SEO Article: Content is King
What is content the king of? And why are so many SEO Agencies and experts preaching something that just sounds like a catch phrase?
Before we start, let’s talk about black hat, white hat and grey hat SEO:
- Black Hat SEO - do things to help rank your website by utilising techniques designed to trick search engines into believing your website should be put on the top of the list.
- White hat SEO is when you stay within the guidelines of the respective search engines and focus on ranking your website naturally.
- Gray hat SEO is using largely white hat SEO, but also utilising SEO techniques that do not blatantly or unreasonably trick search engines.
In essence, any attempt to alter search engine ranking defies the set guidelines by search engines. So are you utilising black hat by default? To answer this we need to look at the principle of what Google is trying to achieve.
Google’s primary goal is to service the need of billions of people who are looking for information quickly. It is through this success that it’s built its advertising empire. So it needs to ensure that the results it retrieves are:
- Highly Relevant to what the searching user is looking for
- Most likely to be sought after
- Compelling
- Topical
- Not copied from some other website
So forget ranking algorithms and published search engine rules. If your website meets the basic criteria above, it isn’t going to be labelled as black hat SEO (within reason of course). And guess what, you do it with your content.
Content is King because in the SEO race for position #1, it trumps all other SEO efforts.
- Great content is link worthy. You’re naturally going to attract links, social media mentions, social bookmarks and great click stats.
- Value added content makes your website unique. And it helps people who visit your website by helping them find what they want, giving them better information or simply just an alternative point of view.
- If you were to link build for your website (gray hat SEO) and search engines do an audit on your website, you’re safe. Your content is what people want, so Google will continue to serve it. (Again within reason, there are plenty of black hat techniques that you will not recover from!)
Google is reasonable, it understands that all sites are going to engage in link building, it knows that we fundamentally all want to be found. It just wants to “quality check” what it is showing. If you have great content and good SEO, then you’ve got the killer combo & Google is your oyster.
Feel free to contact us to discuss how to balance your SEO efforts and let good marketing and content drive your SEO results.
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