Content and SEO – most of the time people talk about the two as if they were mutually exclusive. You can write really good content…or you can write SEO content. Dilemma
I’ve never believed that to be the case. Why would I? I’ve written thousands of pages of really good content that was keyword optimized for SEO. The key is to stop thinking of SEO as a category of content. Rather, it’s the end result we aim for and there are a lot of ways to achieve it.
Increasingly Content IS SEO
For a long time, you could get away with writing pages of bland, meaningless content optimized to 5% for keywords that you wanted to rank for in Google, and while it may not be the best way to reach number one for your search terms, given enough time and enough content, it would have a pretty substantial impact.
Today, that isn’t the case. Google’s infamous Panda update, along with a half decade of tweaks and upgrades to make sure guys like me write quality content for guys and gals like you, have ensured that the only real way to guarantee decent search rankings is to provide valuable content to readers.
It makes sense. The whole point of the rankings in a search engine is to put the best results first – the stuff that offers the highest value to the people searching for those terms. A keyword stuffed article in a directory isn’t quality content (most of the time). It’s marketing content and while it may be perfectly well written, it isn’t the best content.
Why This Makes Our Job Easier
A lot of people grumble and moan about the death of the keyword article. Content stuffing and keyword optimizing a site was how things got done, so what do we do now?
Personally, I have the opposite reaction. Google’s focus on content quality makes it much easier to climb the rankings now because the only thing you really need is well written content designed to provide original, unique value to your readers.
No more pages rewritten from Wikipedia or developing 100 pages of longtail variants on the same keyword over and over and over again. One extremely well written page that attracts attention and gets backlinks from dozens of websites is infinitely more valuable than 200 pages of keyword stuffed content that repeats the same boring ideas over and over again without providing value to your readers.
If you haven’t already, create a blog. This is the single easiest way to get the ideas and content you’re looking for. It’s informal, it’s easy and it allows you to solicit comments that tell you what your readers want to know. If nothing else, it gets fresh content on your website on a daily basis and Google loves fresh content.
