The most valuable Search Engine Optimization technique (SEO) is content quality. Great quality content does a lot of the heavy lifting for SEO. The search engines look for many elements when determining the authority of your site for specific search terms and phrases. How does a computer determine if a website has good quality information on it about the target search terms? If you begin to use your noodle and think about it, it makes sense. If I have good content on a page about something, then you will likely read the content all the way through. This means you will be on the page for some time. That helps your chances for getting ranked better. The search engines measure how much time is spent on web pages. Of course, search engines can read your website content, so they know what keywords are on your pages. They also can see what internal links are pointing to your page, so they understand how important you feel it is. When a page is important to your site it likely has several other pages on the same site that link to it. The most important link to an internal page is from the home page.
Let’s say for instance we make straw hats and we want to be found for some terms on this item. Let’s also assume you hired or have the skill to do some real good on page SEO work, like page titles, internal link building, meta data, etc. so these are not factors. Now comes the fun part. We need to develop pages about straw hats that our target audience finds useful. Well if we want people to look at our pages for a long time we should consider a lot of images of some of the hats. Perhaps different looks of people in our hats and different views of the hats from all different angles, is a good idea. It would also be very useful to have videos of events where people wore our hats to show how spiffy they looked in them. Now our page has 10 images and 3 videos for our customers to look at. Not too hard to do right? Ok so if it is that easy then why doesn’t everyone do that? Well, I am sure there will be people in the top 10 that do better than that. We also write up some great descriptions and ideas about our straw hats. Again this is easy to do and most likely the people ahead of me have done this. I now have a basic page with some quality. We need to take it to the next level however, to move up. How about if we put a chart on the page on how to size a straw hat? We must know it since we sell them, but not a lot of people wear hats today, so they will have to figure out just how fat their head is so they buy the right hat. We can make a little calculator and some other items that go with it to come up with the perfect number for their hat size. Something like this will generate back links. People that sell and use hats or write about fashion will put links on their site to our calculator. Links to our site will help our rankings go up!
People also share good content in social media. Sharing content helps the search engine know that it has value. Even though the links are typically called no-follow links, the search engines measure these to see how much buzz is going on about your website and what people are saying. Your content might get tweeted on Twitter like this “Hey Bob, I know you have a gigantic head and here is a site that can help you measure it”. If the content gets a little viral then you create some nice buzz. If your videos are good enough they also might get shared and linked too. You might want to consider some humor or try to use good looking people. Not yourself in other words. In the super bowl ads GoDaddy doesn’t use bald women.
For more on what the most valuable SEO technique is, call us at 1-800-978-3417 or Contact Active Web Group and let us help you!
