Unique Content and Links
Many of our clients ask questions based on content and links, generally based on the benefits and what is the best way to implement them into a business platform. I feel they are good questions that deserve answering in a non-technical manner. Content On a daily basis I explain to clients that adding unique content to a website is a crucial aspect of SEO. However, the message never seems to get across, so what the hell is unique content?
The Internet needs to be viewed as a community, not just a wonderful tool to make money. The more you give to the community the more your site will be rewarded. To that end, if you spend all day writing an article that is totally your own work (unique), you should be rewarded more rather than copying an article from another source or copying and changing the odd word. Jorge Salgado is the owner of Salgado Investigations, when I started work on Jorge’s site I asked how much content on his blog was his own work and how much was copied from other sources. He admitted that only half was his own work, I explained that all the copied content had to go. Since the removal of this content and the addition of unique content, his blog now receives more visitors than his business website. It should be well written, humorous and give something to the worldwide community (Internet). Search engines base everything around mathematical formulas, which means they will attribute a better score to a unique piece of work than copied transcripts.
The other benefit of using unique content is more keywords will be associated with your website, thus giving a website more search engine exposure. Implementing a content based system to a business website can be done by incorporating a blog or a related article section. I like to do one process that has multiple benefits, in the case of content after adding an article to my website, I link it to the main social bookmarking networks, Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Google, Yahoo and Netvous to name a few. These do not build up backlinks with Google as most of these sites incorporate the ‘no-follow attribute, but it does drive traffic to my website. To recap - adding unique content to a website is good for SEO, if used in the right manner it can drive traffic to a website. Links Link building is a complicated subject, one where the rules change on a constant basis.
Having your link on a website is a good method of adding search engine strength or driving traffic to a site. A link is classed as a vote by search engines, each vote is attributed a score by search engines, higher scores are gained by having a link on an on-themed high-ranking site. This does not mean that linking with low ranked off themed sites is bad, your site will just be given a lower score for that vote, just because a site is not strong today does not mean it will stay that way in the future? The best way to view link building is as a method of building the sites exposure, never use automated tools to build links and always build in a natural manner, 20 a day is natural, 1000 a day is not. Google in particular likes to see links contained within content, as you can see there are a few links within this article, these are called anchors. To that end we can use content and link building at the same time. If you are interested in learning a little more about link building,
I have set up an SEO forum where some of the complexities of link building is discussed in more detail. I hope this short article has helped explain the benefits of content and links.
Pete Arkwright
This article is sponsored by Executive Compass, the UK’s leading supplier of tenders, bid management and PQQ’s
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