Good, relevant content is the real secret of successful search engine optimization. Without good, informative and valuable content, of value to your visitors, your website is nothing more than a hollow shell. Content is one thing a search engine looks for on your site. So bear this very much in mind, if you are striving for a good search engine ranking.
Yet there's a whole search engine marketing industry out there, dedicated to tweaking search engines to the nth degree. Many of these tips may work for a while. Then the rules change - and off everyone goes on the merry-go-round again! As with most success stories, there's no quick fix – just plain common sense and sticking to the fairly obvious - but boring - aspects that work.
It's worth repeating here: search engines – particularly the top ones like the Google search engine and the Yahoo search engine – love good relevant content. They can see from your keywords (provided they also appear in the text!) if the content is relevant and they can see from the number of people linking to you, if you're providing good content other humans want to read.
Until recently, webmasters simply needed to paste up other people's articles from an article directory onto their website and hey presto – instant content to increase their search engine ranking.
Because it was such a simple, yet effective solution – and not affected by an overnight change in algorithms, many websites profited from the arrangement.
But search engines are getting smarter all the time. As a result, they are becoming aware of duplicated content, which occurs when everyone uses the same articles on their website. This is particularly so of Google. And, because they now account for about half of search engine traffic, their attitude must always be considered.
So, to set yourself apart from the masses and gain a distinct advantage in the search engine stakes is to create (or have created for you) unique content. Fortunately, there are several ways you can do this to ensure your site becomes a good source of relevant and useful content.
Think carefully about writing the articles yourself!
The disadvantage of doing this is the time involved. However, it does ensure you get an extremely relevant piece of content. In addition, you can set up a list of keyword search terms around which to build your article. This ensures it gains maximum attention from both the search engines and visitors.
This, in turn will ensure you generate a great deal of web site traffic.
A very cost effective method is to employ a ghost writer, who will write a series of articles to your instructions. Most experienced ghost writers are skilled at incorporating a list of keywords, should you care to provide them.
There is, naturally, a cost element, although building up a relationship with an author, who writes good English, but lives in a country where a dollar goes a long way can minimize this. But the overall long term increase in sales will more than pay for them. Add to that the advantage of being able to use your own time more profitably for other marketing activities and you can begin to see why many of the top names on the internet use ghost writers themselves!
In the longer term, it's a pretty safe bet the webmasters who have taken the time and trouble to have well crafted unique, content will be the winners in the battle for top spots on the search engine rankings.
In a future article, I'll show you the off site aspects you can easily put in place to give you links from highly ranked websites and so provide you with some more really simple and affordable search engine optimization.
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