A quiet revolution is underway in the world of search engine optimisation (SEO), and at long last it seems that it will favour good quality content writing above those dodgy tactics deployed under “old SEO” to manipulate crumby sites to rank better with search engines.
The days of keyword stuffing, crap content and dodgy backlinking are coming to a close, according to digital marketing specialist Brett Relander, and not before time. He thinks SEO should be defined more correctly as “the optimization of a website’s online presence to help the search engines find and rank a high quality site at or near the top of the SERPs”.
Despite the ditching of Google authorship last year, Google and other search engines are shifting inexorably from traditional SEO (the bad old SEO mentioned a moment ago) to a genuine focus on authoritative, high-quality content. That doesn’t mean that you can ignore your metadata or stop identifying relevant keywords. But it does mean that you’ll need to be more refined: what emerged during 2014 especially, Relander argues, is that content really is king: good quality content with a strong emphasis on authority now leads the pack of SEO techniques.
And it’s not only Google that’s focusing on this. In December, SearchEngineLand.com reported that Bing now has its very own version of Google Panda and is focusing as never before on quality content. Several factors are included to assess this, but authority is one of the more prominent. In a nutshell, marketers are going to need to shift their focus toward commissioning the best writing services they can find to create content that’s both relevant and newsworthy.
Relander insists that top quality content is now the key not only to driving more organic search traffic to a site, but to building trust amongst those visitors. His recommendations? They’re here:
- Be knowledgeable and passionate about your topic. Take the time to conduct thorough research.
- Be original. Whether it is producing original research or taking a different perspective, make a point of bringing something new to the table.
- Focus on well-written content. Take the time to produce carefully-crafted content.
- Share your content with targeted communities. Remember, social signals are often a vital source for determining authority.
The time to start boosting your online authority with authoritative content is now.
