Page Content Means Chuff All? But Wait ...

The Pen is Mightier than the Link

I love it when people are anal about tweaking their KWD from 5% to 5.5% in the hope that it'll move them up a couple of places.

My approach from 11 years of doing SEO (bugger I'm 32 on Wednesday!) is that everything should be natural. Of course I didn't think that when I first started. I was never a spammer on client sites but on my own I'd always "push" the envelope.

But the last week has really proven to me how little page content can play in good rankings.

First off a client (I hope they don't mind me mentioning them anonymously) hired an SEO company in India to improve their rankings. This company produced a whole list of key phrases that they got the client to #1 spot. But the thing is that they weren't totally relevant to the type of people they attracted and were based primarily on anchor text. There was no re-writing of content.

The second experience was that I created two new one page 
sites for two new robots coming out this year. I linked to 
them both from my toy robot blog. But the thing was I loaded 
the same site content on to both domains by mistake.

The upshot was that I ended up ranking #3 for the one word name of that robot with no mention of that 
keyword at all in the visible text or tags of the page. 
(The other site actually ranks #4 and #5 as well).

So some of you may be very quick and jumping to the conclusion that all you've got to do these days is to get a site  and link to it with your target keywords in the anchor text and not really worry about the page content and keyword variation.

Here's some reasons why its important not to do this:

1) Keyword variation will, by definition, help you attract a wider range of visitors. Just looking at my Easter eggs site. I have a range of around 30,000 different key phrases that attract traffic because I focus on thinking of all the phrases that people may search for and build them in naturally.

2) There's no point just focusing on getting people to  your site and then hoping they convert. I've seen this happen with so many sites. The content on your site isn't only there to attract people, but also to convert them into sales. Make sure you encourage those visitors to click on the right links.

3) You've got to think ahead. The search patterns people are using now, won't be the same as they'll be using a few months down the line. Try and predict how these search patterns will change.

4) The quality of your site will determine how likely you will obtain natural, free links. Many affiliates and site owner forget about this. It's not a case of building a site and the links will follow. On many occasions I'll just spend ten minutes seeding a site and then let the links naturally build up. I virtually rely solely on the quality of the content I create to achieve this. Perhaps its because I prefer 
writing than grovelling for links?

5) Of course Google does love unique content. If you're blogging, creating 'label' or 'tag' pages can course no-end of grief. Writing long, unique posts can help you break out of any internal-duplication problem.

6) If you write good, long, interesting posts it also gives Google a greater opportunity to 'theme' your site. This is important and many forget about this factor.

7) If you write good content you give yourself more opportunity to cross link to your other sites or create internal links in a more relevant and useful fashion.

So don't forget the benefits of writing good content - the benefits are there to be seen. Don't be lazy and try and get loads of KW-rich links, its just lazy and are more likely to be devalued in the algo than the content of your pages.