Content Returns As King

In truth it never went away but there's been so much talk, especially over the past couple of years about functionality, canonicals, 301 redirects, 404 pages etc, etc, etc, that some SEO's forget that good content is vital to the success of any website.

Now I'm not saying that these issues should be ignored, but without original well written content you are on a highway to nothing! The recent Google's Panda Update spells out that quality content is more of a focus than ever before, and many websites are suffering following recent changes to the Google algorithm;

Here's what Google say on the subject;

"Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don't want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that's copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful. In addition, it's important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site's ranking as a whole. For this reason, if you believe you've been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content."

Some wee pointers then;

1. When writing content for your website please don't copy directly from other sites, quite apart from copyright infringements Google sees duplicated content which it is now starting to penalise.
2. Make sure that the content on your web pages is well-written and check for grammur, speelling, etc.
3. If you write about a topic that others have written about, credit the writer and add value or useful pointers for your audience.
4. Last, but by no means least - make sure that your anchor text is properly written when creating inbound links to a page

Posted by Dan at 10/03/2011 20:23:00