Content is king when it comes to SEO. A good blog post, case study, white paper, or other content-heavy page on your site naturally will contain relevant keywords and is likely to attract inbound links.
But that content has to be useful, relevant, and readable for humans. Too often these days, unscrupulous sites are trying to game the SEO system by creating content that’s heavy on keywords and light on actual value.
Avoid working with any SEO firm that recommends the following content strategies:
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Content Scraping – Copying content without permission from high-ranking websites and placing it on your own pages in an attempt to boost your site’s ranking. Content scraping typically is a violation of copyright law, and a practice most associated with spam sites.
•
Keyword-stuffed Content – Using low-paid writers to create low-quality articles clearly designed to attract search bots by repeating a keyword over and over in the text. Remember, your content is supposed to engage the visitor and get him or her to take the next step. It’s not just search-bot bait.
What’s more, Google recently made changes to its search algorithm to downgrade sites that were using “shallow or low-quality content” to achieve high search rankings. A study by the SEO software maker Sistrix found that the top-25 sites most associated with low-quality content had lost 70%-90% of their search engine visibility after the change.
•
Posting Fake Reviews – Masquerading as satisfied customers to write positive reviews of your business on review sites or local search engines in order to get links back to you site. Sites that have been caught posting fake reviews on the Internet have been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Even if your firm isn’t using one of these blatantly bad content strategies, make sure that any content they create for your site includes a clear call-to-action or “next step” for the visitor to take. You must have some way for the visitors who land on any page from a search visit to actually buy your product or become a lead.
Just creating content that gets a high-ranking, but doesn’t get visitors to actually do something on the page, is a waste of time.
But that content has to be useful, relevant, and readable for humans. Too often these days, unscrupulous sites are trying to game the SEO system by creating content that’s heavy on keywords and light on actual value.
Avoid working with any SEO firm that recommends the following content strategies:
•
Content Scraping – Copying content without permission from high-ranking websites and placing it on your own pages in an attempt to boost your site’s ranking. Content scraping typically is a violation of copyright law, and a practice most associated with spam sites.
•
Keyword-stuffed Content – Using low-paid writers to create low-quality articles clearly designed to attract search bots by repeating a keyword over and over in the text. Remember, your content is supposed to engage the visitor and get him or her to take the next step. It’s not just search-bot bait.
What’s more, Google recently made changes to its search algorithm to downgrade sites that were using “shallow or low-quality content” to achieve high search rankings. A study by the SEO software maker Sistrix found that the top-25 sites most associated with low-quality content had lost 70%-90% of their search engine visibility after the change.
•
Posting Fake Reviews – Masquerading as satisfied customers to write positive reviews of your business on review sites or local search engines in order to get links back to you site. Sites that have been caught posting fake reviews on the Internet have been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Even if your firm isn’t using one of these blatantly bad content strategies, make sure that any content they create for your site includes a clear call-to-action or “next step” for the visitor to take. You must have some way for the visitors who land on any page from a search visit to actually buy your product or become a lead.
Just creating content that gets a high-ranking, but doesn’t get visitors to actually do something on the page, is a waste of time.
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