Over the years, SEO professionals, content writers and internet marketers have been so hung up on optimizing content for keywords that the quality of content has suffered in many cases and end up appearing tailor made for the search engine bots.
Little do we realize that a search bot is never going to buy our e-book or the best in breed cooking grill. It is ultimately humans that we have to focus on, when developing content.
Content that appeals to humans, incentivizes them to spend time on the site and urges them to take action and results in buying the product or signing up for the newsletter, whatever may be the objective of that article.
When content is interesting and captivates the reader’s attention, everything else described above is a natural consequence. Instead, too much focus is placed on link text, building backlinks using techniques related to beg, borrow or steal school of thought and trying to rank the article for head keywords (one or two term phrases that describe the niche) on top of the Google search mountain.
It is important to understand why Google’s search algorithm has evolved so drastically over the years. Google was quite transparent at one point of time when RagePank (Pagerank LOL) was the rage of the internet. Everyone and his/her dog knew that manipulating the anchor text (link text – either internal or backlinks) to be keyword rich (niche specific) was the secret to scaling the Google search peak.
SEO professionals need to have something concrete to manipulate. Without any explicit algorithmic feature that can be exploited, it is well nigh impossible to do this. This is the strategy Google has adopted over the years to keep the manipulating hordes at bay. Today, no one is certain about the value that Google allocates to the various components of its search algorithm.
This is not an indictment on the Search Engine Optimization profession or professionals who practice it This is a fact and bears testimony to the way Google has evolved. There are still best practices in SEO like in any other profession – good quality content based on the rich practical experience the writer has in her/his domain (machine learning algorithms employed today are far sophisticated and can easily be as good as or far better judge than top professionals in that field), the way the article is written and usage of important domain specific keywords and the various entities the main keyword bears relationship to (for example, when the President of US is mentioned, there is bound to be a reference to the White House), the freshness of perspective etc.
There is also a huge misconception that the more backlinks you have to your site, the more effective it is in ranking at the top. This is not entirely true. Quality of backlinks is more important than sheer quantity.
Google has placed emphasis on age of the domain (in other words how long you have been in business), the number of times the domain has been sold and bought (is it a steady business), the authority of the domain and domain trust, a few key factors that play a huge role in the final ranking.
If you notice closely, these are factors that cannot be overturned or acquired easily. For instance domain age – you cannot turn the clock back at will. Domain authority can only be achieved through hard work of churning quality content over time and earning backlinks on merit due to others finding your content useful and linking to it (aka earned media).
Domain trust is based on how many hops it takes for your site to be connected to a domain that is trustworthy in Google’s eyes. Another tough ranking feature is how well your site is liked by the rest of the web. Trying to figure this out is something that can leave you scratching your head.
With all these factors in play, it is no longer possible to manipulate Google’s algorithm. Some may have found out a way to exploit loopholes. But it is like building a huge beautiful mansion in quicksand. It is only a matter of time before an advanced sophisticated machine learning big kahuna like Google catches up and crushes such sites to dust.
Considering the complexity of the search landscape present today, you may wonder – What should I do to build a lasting presence on Google and be in its good books?
The answer is simple – stop trying to write articles for the sole purpose of ranking on Google. Start writing content for human users. If users keep coming back to your site for more content food, you are ahead of the competition and winning the content marketing game. This alone is enough for the search spiders to come hunting for the same content food.
Although Google would not admit openly to anything today in terms of its ranking algorithm, the time spent on site by users, a high bounce rate (where users land on your site and without taking any action leave the site in a jiffy) and the depth of activity on the site (Page depth in Google Analytics) all could be contributing their bit to the algorithm. This is speculation on my part but a rather common sensical one.
I will put a stop here and continue in the next post the definition of content marketing and how it can be combined effectively with very minimal ad spend to get the best ROI. We provide a low cost content marketing service that is ideal for small businesses. Check it out.
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