Search Engine Optimisation - Content Plus Links Are Essential
I often see companies offer Search Engine Optimisation services by offering to develop content for your website and to optimise the site itself. This is all very well, and a necessary part of SEO, however, it is not going to be enough.
Getting more content published on your site is very important for a variety of reasons. You are expanding the net that you are casting in the search engines. The more content you have on your site, the bigger the net. Content on your site is like casting a net to catch lots of little fish. The little fish are what is known as the ‘long tail’ of keywords. These are the unusual, longer term keywords that people use to search for very specific products and services. Instead of looking for ’sneakers’, they might look for ’sneakers for broad feet’. The conventional wisdom in Internet Marketing, and there is certainly truth in it, is that you should have content on your site covering sneakers for broad feet if you want to attract visitors to your site through that search term. After all, if the content is not there, your site will never come up for the term, so yes, you definitely need to generate the right type of content for your site, and generate it regularly.
The other reason why more content on your site is important is that you attract more search engine spider activity. As the search engines find that you have regular, fresh content on your site, they will spider your site more regularly. The more they spider your site regularly, the better is your chance to appear in the search engines for the content that you are publishing.
But just publishing content is not enough, unfortunately.
Yes, new content on your site will eventually attract links to your site and eventually your site will start to perform, but it can be a long and painful process. I have sites with pages and pages of content, and yet these sites get very few visitors. The reason for this is that these sites have just too low a rank in Google. I am not talking here specifically of Page Rank as such, the visible Page Rank that you see attached to a website is not always the true Page Rank that Google uses internally, and I have sites with a Page Rank of 1 perform very well in the search engines. It is just that without SOME search optimisation in the form of link building you will find that your site takes a very long time to show up for anything in the search engines. The reason for that is external links to the site builds up the importance of your site in the search engines’ eyes, and the more ‘important’ your site is deemed to be, the more likely it is that your unique content pages show up for long tail keywords.
In order then to gain the maximum benefit out of publishing content on your site, you have to make sure that you also increase the importance of your website through some link building strategy, whether to submit to web directories, submitting articles, distributing press releases or whatever strategy works best for you to get your site out there.
