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Over optimizing your content can cost you search engine rankings. While all the time you’re talking about optimizing your content for search engine, what exactly do we mean by over-optimization?
We already know that we have to create our content around our important keywords. Up till here it is well and good. The problem arises when we get too obsessed with our keywords and instead of focusing on quality we start focusing on quantity.
Even if you remain conscious of the quality factor, sometimes you can produce too much of similar content. To be frank I tend to do that. Sometimes I simply go on creating pages and blog posts on similar topics. Not being in SEO person I didn’t even realize that my content was having a negative impact on my rankings until it was a bit late. I realized that, and fortunately, I could recover by removing and reorienting my content. Being a professional content writer was certainly helpful.
The writer rightly puts emphasis on quality and purposefulness rather than simply flooding your website with lots of keyword-centric content.
But then what about covering all your primary and secondary keyword combinations? Again, this is no longer acceptable to Google. Have all the primary pages, use the right language that sounds natural to your human visitors and then, on a regular basis, publish content that is relevant, timely and useful.
This is a question Internet marketers are facing again and again. Should businesses invest more on content or SEO in order to improve their search engine rankings?
I think both are specialised fields and you cannot favour one and ignore the other. Yes, your business needs content, written content, but it also needs to appear among top results in order to make that content accessible to search engine users.
But what if you have limited budget? What if you have to decide between content writing and SEO? What do you choose?
I will choose, certainly, content writing. It’s not because I myself am a content writer, I actually see the logic in it. Why do your individual pages and blog posts get indexed and ranked? What do people share on their social networking websites? It is your content. Without good content there is no hope of getting good search engine rankings, but without investing in SEO and by merely focusing on high quality content, you can always get good rankings.
Content is a communication and information medium. You talk to your prospects through your content. You generate leads and consequently business through your content. No matter how great your search engine rankings are, unless your content is able to convert that traffic to solid business, they are of no use.
On the other hand, have content that has good conversion rate and even mediocre traffic from search engines can get you good business.
Conventional wisdom says that you get good search engine rankings by doing the following two things:
Creating valuable content
Getting high-quality back links
Take care of these aspects and most of your SEO problem is solved.
As rightly mentioned in this blog post titled “The big SEO secret for bloggers” there is nothing like high-quality content when it comes to improving your search engine rankings. Long gone are the days when you had to use “SEO tactics” to get good rankings; right now it is primarily the quality of your content that decides what rankings you’re going to enjoy over the search engines.
So it doesn’t matter how you publish and organize your content? Sure, it does. You have to organise your content in such a manner that it is easier for search engine crawlers to find your content, index it and rank it.
Do your niche keywords matter?
They do. But you don’t have to go overboard. Using “keywords” doesn’t mean a certain density, it just means using the right words to convey your message and prepare your content. For instance, if I write a blog post on content writing, this expression should appear in the text rather than “content preparing” or “content formulating” (I know it doesn’t mean anything, but it is just an example). The basic idea is, delivering some value that makes people come to your blog or website again and again, and this is what search engines are looking for. They want to present relevant links to their users.
Doesn’t bad content rank well any more?
It surely does. Search engine algorithms are not foolproof and sometimes links that don’t deserve good rankings get good rankings. But they don’t enjoy good rankings for long, sooner or later they are discovered and then allocated ranking they deserve.
Spend more and more time on producing better quality content rather than lots of content and you will see a marked difference in your search engine rankings and also, your conversion rate.
Although this has got nothing directly to do with content writing and content marketing, since it can help my clients I have decided to write on this topic. Frankly, I haven’t really started using Google Plus as regularly as I use Facebook and Twitter, but the Google +1 button is slightly different from the social networking platform Google is trying to promote.
What is the Google +1 button?
You can see the Google +1 button on the top of this blog post (most probably on the right hand side at the top).
It can be used like a “thumbs up” act by your visitors. If you’re familiar with how the Digg button works, with every click, the number of people who have “plussed” your link increases. On Digg, the more diggs you have, the better is your chance of getting on Digg.com homepage and all of sudden increasing traffic to your website by hundreds of thousands. I am personally not very impressed with the sort of traffic you get from Digg.com but that is just a difference of opinion I guess.
The Google +1 button achieves almost the same thing, but instead of helping you get to the homepage of Digg.com, it helps you improve your search engine rankings. It is something like page rank: the more “trusted” websites and blogs link to you, the better your search engine rankings get.
The Google +1 button is a step closer to “humanizing” search engine results. So far, almost all the search engines have depended on ranking algorithms to rank various links. Although these algorithms are mathematically sound, after all they are algorithms, and whenever you have algorithms, people can devise workarounds.
But if actual human beings start recommending web pages and blog posts by clicking on the Google +1 button it increases their relevance in the real sense. Then Google doesn’t have to depend much on its algorithms and its search engine results are more validated and relevant. So if you have a Google +1 button on your website, you are allowing your visitors to help you improve your search engine rankings. When they click on your Google +1 button they recommend your link to Google.com – “Rank this link well, it is definitely good!”
It is like “social search”. This concept has been introduced by many newcomer search engines.
Some even say Google.com immediately crawls your web page and indexes it the moment you install the Google +1 button on it. I’m not particularly sure of that. Anyway, if you regularly publish content on your website or blog, your content gets indexed within a few seconds or a few minutes of the new content appearing on your website or blog.
Another benefit of having a Google +1 button on your website or blog
The Google +1 button also allows you to post the link you are presently on directly to your Google Plus profile. It is like, Facebook or Twitter plug-in that allows you to straightaway post the link under your profile.
How to install a Google +1 button on your website or blog
The direct way to install the Google +1 button is by heading to the official Google webpage dedicated to the button. This page has code snippets that you need to insert into your website. The first code snippet is for the button to appear wherever you want it to appear, and the second code snippet is the required JavaScript that you will be putting within the <head></head> section of your website.
If you manage your blog or website with WordPress (as I do) you can simply install a plug-in to display the Google +1 button. This is not the only recommended plug-in – you can use whatever you prefer. If you’re using a social media plug-in as you can see on the left hand side of this blog post, it might already be coming up preloaded with the Google +1 one button feature.
Here is a small video on the Google +1 one button (from Google.com):
Your search engine rankings definitely depend on the sort of content you have on your website/blog and also the quantity if you face tough competition. Your content conveys to the search engine algorithms exactly what information your website contains. Than the search engine algorithms use their own logic to rank your content according to the keywords and search terms used by their respective users. On a basic level a search engine like Google.com ranks your pages according to
The quality of your content
The quantity of quality content
The occurrence of keywords and relevant phrases
The usability of your website
The number of “trusted” websites linking to your website
The importance of an SEO content writer
As far as an SEO content writer goes, his or her job is not only producing great content for your website but also arranging the text in such a manner that it is easier for search engine crawlers to crawl it, index it and then supply that information back to the search engine servers. There is a thin line that divides quality/qualified content and spammy content. Even when you think that you have got great content going for your website (most of us don’t intentionally want to publish spammy content) you might end up having suspicious content just because your SEO content writer doesn’t actually know how to create SEO content.
That is why it is very important to work with a content writer who exactly knows what he or she is doing and also has a performance record to prove that. Merely having an ability to use keywords again and again doesn’t make one an SEO content writer. He or she should know that search engine algorithms can also read between the lines.
Can your SEO content writer improve your search engine rankings?
Of course your SEO content writer can improve your search engine rankings because after all your search engine rankings are all about the content you have. Frankly content can exist in many forms and textual content (where a content writer gets involved) is just one of them. Content on your website can exist in the form of video, audio, presentation slides and images and almost all major search engines have separate engines dealing with them. But if you want to be found for written/textual content then your SEO content writer can make a big difference.
An SEO expert is totally different from a content writer. An SEO expert can help you improve your search engine rankings but he or she cannot help you improve your conversion rate. Your conversion rate can only be improved by compelling content: content that informs as well as convinces.
SEO experts have their own importance and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t hire SEO experts to improve your search engine rankings, but given a choice between hiring an SEO expert and hiring an SEO content writer I will always suggest you to go for an SEO content writer. This is not because I myself am a content writer and hence I’m biased towards them, it’s just that if you are hiring an SEO expert at the cost of an SEO content writer then you aren’t achieving much (it’s another matter if you already have high-quality compelling content but it’s not faring well on search engines – that again indirectly means that it is not high-quality content, but anyway, I digress).
With an SEO content writer – provided he or she really knows his or her stuff – you kill two birds with one stone (I’m not in favor of killing birds, by the way). You get a content writer that produces high-quality content and consequently improves your conversion rate, and additionally, he or she also gets the right people to your website from search engines and other online sources.
