Content is King in the SEO Process – Why Unique Content Matters
Search Engine Optimization and the process of creating good unique content for your website come hand in hand. With all the recent updates to various different google search algorithms it’s becoming hard for SEOs to keep on top of the recent changes as well as update their old content to match the newest rules. There is, however, one way that is always going to be easier (and better in some respects) than applying new SEO rules to your pages. There’s a phrase, nay a rule, that keeps coming to mind as the only true tried and tested method of keeping on top of the SERPS. That rule is “Content is King!”
The reason Content is King
Content is always going to be King because a real person is only going to share something that is useful or enjoyable and a share is someone publically stating that your content is good. If you create bad content – or pages that are focused specifically on pleasing the search engines more than the viewer then you may get organic traffic but that traffic will very rarely get conversions.
What it used to mean
The phrase ‘Content is King’ could be interpreted in many ways. Over the years it has meant many things – before SEO was an established practice the term meant simply building as many pages into your site as was possible within your topic. The content could be copy/paste text from anywhere else on the web and the internet began to be flooded by the same content simply on different sites. That was the beginning of SEO because you had to have a way of getting your site, with the same page content, above the rest and the search engines had to find a way of working out which order to rank the sites. Keyword stuffing was the way it was commonly done back then: putting them in the page text, in the meta tags and even making some keyword laden text the same color as the background to hide it from the viewer.
Roll back just 2/3 years ago from now and the terms still had it’s roots in getting as much related content on your site but basically it was achieved by aggregating – or scrapping – articles from other sites onto your own and displaying it in such a way that provides a small value to the viewer. Again it’s very hard for you to be the best of the bunch when everyone has exactly the same content as you – the battle was with how that content was arranged to provide the most use to the user.
Unique content is King
Today the term still means many things but I have, for a long time, prefered to paraphrase it as “Unique content is King”. If you have content that nobody else has then your already ahead of the game because search engines don’t need to figure out which version is the source of the content and credit it as such – they already know it’s yours.
Why should I create unique content
The reason to create your own content could be any number of things: You could be reporting the news, launching a product, reviewing a film, giving a oppinion, answering common questions on a topic, establishing a presence for your start-up or launching a campaign for an already established business – the list is endless. There is always a reason to create content and if what you create is good then people will either find a use for it or simply enjoy it. If people like what they see then that might be your goal completed but most of the time that is only the beginning of the goal completion (or money-making) process.
If you create something enjoyable then people will share links to it via social networks and publicly ‘like’ your content or maybe they might write something on their own site about your article. Search engines love it when people publicly tell everyone that they thought something was good, it makes their job easier. The more people who ‘like’ or link to your content the better and if your content is completely different then your massively improving the chances of success by giving searchers only a single place to find what you have to share.
Natural Link Building
Natural link building, or Organic link building, is the process of naturally obtaining links from different users around the web.
Why are links important?
Links have always been big in the SEO world. You need to be linked from somewhere or else search engines simply won’t ever find you. The more links you could point to your site the better – or at least that used to be the case. Google used to have a method of determining the importance of a page known as “PageRank”. It still exists today but holds a much less dominant position. PageRank was highly influenced by the links to your site but nowadays (with less emphasis on PageRank), and indeed for a while now, the power of the link to your site is more important than the sheer amount of links pointing to it.
Getting natural links
To get links you need to provide some kind of a use to a reader that encourages them to share the page. They might share it with a friend by word-of-mouth or like it on Facebook or maybe even talk about it in whatever next article they might write on their own site. You want all of those things from your readers. You want them to engage with it and then act on that engagement.
- People share good content
In Conclusion
know about the good ol’ saying ‘Content is King’ saying what do you think? It’s obvious you need to catch the interest of the search engines through some kind of SEO but do you agree it’s more important to focus on creating good content that your readers can relate to and engage with? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below!
