Once upon a time, it was all about keywords – as many as you could cram in on every page, something that often forced site owners to choose between appealing to robots and appealing to humans. Now, all that has changed and content is king. Search engines rank the value of sites based in large part on the relevance, quality and frequency of fresh content they display. To make the most of your site, you need to fill it with the best content you can.
Something original
Some people try to cut corners and fill their sites with material that they’ve arranged to borrow from elsewhere. Search engines are wise to this, however, and there’s a risk that you’ll be penalised for it. Original and unique content, by contrast, will give your site an automatic boost. Sites that publish only original content, and plenty of it, benefit significantly as a result. They’re also much more appealing to human visitors, who quickly learn that each time they go there, they’ll find something new and unique.
Keeping it moving
Few things make search engines as happy as sites that are frequently updated, and you should aim to have something new appearing daily if you want to make it into the top three listings for your target search terms – the ones that count if people surfing on mobile devices are going to consider visiting you. Keeping up with this yourself is hard, but using a guest blog post service takes the effort out of it, and a good one will produce well-crafted material that sends out all the right signals to humans and robots alike.
Quality matters
Search engines are getting better and better at distinguishing high-quality content, and we are entering an era when problems such as poor spelling or layout can lead to your rankings dropping. Part of the reason for this is that poor-quality writing is associated with sites whose content has been farmed out to low-cost writers who don’t have English as a native language, making it easier to distinguish from in-house or carefully commissioned work by people with genuine expertise in the relevant subjects.
Keeping it relevant
Although it’s no longer advisable to have more than two or three instances of the same keyword (or key phrase) on a page because of the way that penalties are applied, they are still important and you can always mix and match them. Any language closely associated with the focus of your site will be helpful because search engines are getting better at identifying which words fit together and using them to determine the overall relevance of a site to a particular subject.
When you invest in high-quality content, you’re not only giving your site a boost in the immediate term, but you’re also building an archive that will continue to benefit you over the long term. Linking from new articles to old ones strengthens this effect and enables you to develop your site in a way that makes it stronger and stronger over time.
