May 11
16
Content is Bank for Creators
Google’s behaviour drives the practices of the search engine optimization industry. Two years of rapid change in the way Google displays and ranks various types of web documents has put a renewed focus on quality content creation.
It is a good time to be a content creator in the search marketing industry. In a world of grazing Pandas, the organic content creator can prosper.
It is also a more difficult time to be a search marketer and advertiser. Feeding a world of grazing Pandas, especially ones which enjoy organic content is likely to become expensive. Website owners are going to have to focus funding and personal energy on creating search ready content.
Earning top 10 search rankings at Google and Bing for competitive keywords and phrases is now only slightly more complicated than the process of writing, publishing and marketing a book.
The Internet is populated by hundreds of billions of documents. A world’s worth of news, entertainment and personal content is added and archived daily. Search engines are by necessity instant arbiters of taste and sincerity.
Where a well targeted link building campaign was once enough to propel mediocre sites to higher rankings, Google and Bing want to become more discerning in their choices. Amongst those hundreds of billions of documents are millions of pages of extremely useful content. Google appears to be trying to find that useful content by degrading what it sees as less-than-useful content in its index.
In a crux, that’s what the hullabaloo is over the series of recent updates commonly known as Panda.
Today, web content has to be thought of in terms of segments as well as in terms of file-type. Different types of audiences view the web at different venues. Though targeted at unique crowds, commercial content messages have to compliment each other. A new product page at the client’s website is promoted with a shared note at Facebook, a series of scheduled Tweets and an article or two distributed through the usual social media aggregators. Each Facebook and article link will use anchor text relevant to both the target page and the page the link originated from. Everything from the Facebook posts and tweets to the anchor text used to phrase are all types of search and indexable content. Google is now finding signals in virtually every form of content.
These changes have been a long time coming.
Two years ago Google began ranking a number of different types of results sets on its first page. Google appeared to be experimenting live-time with how to best display combinations of video, news, local, shopping, paid and organic search results. Though the standard organic results had been effectively downgraded, Google had opened a number of new content based channels for search marketers.
About eighteen months ago, search engines finally started getting a handle on outright manipulation of links. Businesses built to deliver incoming links were moved to begin looking towards content creation as a part of their link-building strategies. Though the engines have a lot of work remaining combating link manipulation, these moves shifted focus towards content creation.
This was a good thing in one sense as it was the start of a solution for a critical problem but it created another problem to plague search engines. Aut0-generated content began polluting the web as a tool primarily for driving bot-traffic to target landing pages.
This year Google is working to crack down on bad content such as scraped reprints, auto-generated made-for-adwords pages, inarticulate page fodder from article factories and the like. It’s a process of removing generally useless web clutter.
With unique localized and increasingly personalized result sets being generated and displayed for individual users, creative content is again the most powerful tool in the SEO toolbox.
Jim Hedger
Jim Hedger is an organic SEO and digital marketing specialist. Jim has been involved in the online marketing industry since 1998 and a SEO since 1999. Best known as a broadcaster, interviewer, content writer and search industry commentator, Jim is a frequent conference speaker and organizer. He hosts the search focused radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM and is a WebmasterRadio.FM conference interviewer. Jim brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, passion and creative thinking to each project. Preferring a teamwork approach, Jim strives to inform and train his clients and their staff to run and maintain their own search and social media efforts.
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