MD Internet Marketing Solutions

Why Your SEO Campaigns Should Revolve Around Quality

Long gone are the days of the “wild west” on the internet. In the old days you use to be able to just throw up any old piece of content that was keyword stuffed and didn’t have good or relevant information for the person performing the search.

As the search engines become smarter and actually learn, your website, or whatever property you are trying to rank in the searches, must be all about quality. Your site must provide good quality and informative information for the person performing the search as well as fresh information for the search engines.

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When it comes to quality, there are two things that you must always pay attention to for your site. You need to have quality content on your site and quality backlinks pointing to your site. Backlinks AND content in the form of regular posts are a key factor in search engine rankings.

Quality Content

First, lets look at quality content. When it comes to posts that you write they need to be informative as well as trying to stay on topic as much as possible. To find good quality content for your site you can post what’s new in your industry. You can also post about new things inside your own company.

In some industries it may be hard to come up with new content to publish frequently enough, which brings us to “content curation”, or basically copying and pasting part of another blog’s material in your post.

It’s okay to go ahead and copy a part or small section of someone else’s content and add it to your post as long as it makes sense and adds value to your content. We will go more in depth on content curation in a later post, as this topic deserves a post all on it’s own.

However, one thing that you must do when copying someone else’s content, and is very important, is to make sure that you give a link back to the original source as not to receive cease and desist letters from angry publishers. It’s only fair to give someone credit for their material. You can learn more if you research the Digital Millennial Copyright Act.

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A few good questions that you can ask yourself about the content you are thinking of publishing are found in a post by Search Engine Land:

Chapter 2: Content & Search Engine Success Factors

Cq: Content Quality

More than anything else, are you producing quality content? If you’re selling something, do you go beyond being a simple brochure with the same information that can be found on hundreds of other sites?

Do you provide a reason for people to spend more than a few seconds reading your pages?

Do you offer real value, something of substance to visitors, that is unique, different, useful and that they won’t find elsewhere?

These are just some of the questions to ask yourself in assessing whether you’re providing quality content. This is not the place to skimp since it is the cornerstone upon which nearly all other factors depend. Continue Reading “Chapter 2: Content & Search Engine Success Factors

There are a lot of good points in this article. We also agree with a point that is made later in the article about content freshness, which we touched upon earlier about making posts with recent industry news. There is also more in the post that is good information about how Google is now providing what is know as “direct answers” and how people feel differently on whether or not it is beneficial for their websites.

Quality Backlinks

Okay, so now you have a good idea about creating good quality content for your Website SEO campaign. Now on to Backlinks.

Back in the “wild west” days of the internet, the quality of your backlinks didn’t matter so much, or really at all. The more backlinks that you had, coming from any source was…. good. The links could come from sites that were total spam or link farms. The sites didn’t even have to be relevant to your site or the link didn’t even have to be in a post or page that was relevant to your site.

Not so much the case anymore. Now days the general rule with links is quality over quantity is far better. Just a hand full of backlinks from highly relevant and trusted websites is better than a bunch of backlinks from sites that have nothing to do with your niche. For example a link coming from a contractors site to a dental site.

The definition of a quality backlink from Webopedia is basically just that:

“a quality backlink is a backlink that links to your Web site using your keywords or keyword phrase, and also appears on a Web site that has the same theme or similar content topic as your own Web site.”

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Because these quality backlinks are harder to get is one reason that the cost of SEO campaigns continues to rise.

And to be clear, we don’t care what anyone says about backlinks. Backlinks continue to drive the web, and without them your site will not rank. Google is working on other methods into their algorithms to help the search engine giant decipher who’s website should get top rankings, but is probably still years off.

So how do you get these quality backlinks? We found an article that has some great tips for someone that is trying to do SEO on their own. The article was written by Bamidele Onibalusi on the blog ShoutMeLoud.com

7 Ways To Get Quality Backlinks

Links control the web and links are one of the most important things to every webmaster. With the advent of Google, SEO began to gain more traction and and backlinks became a major element of SEO success.

Since building backlinks is very critical to the success of any webmaster, this post will be talking about 7 ways to get quality backlinks for your blog/website.

1. Article Marketing

For a long time now article marketing has been one of the best and most effective ways to get quality backlinks to your blog, even though this method works there are some things you must consider when trying to get backlinks through article marketing. This is not as great as guest posting and one thing which is very important, do article marketing on relevant websites only. For example, if you are a SEO company, you should post content on an article directory which is only targeting SEO niche.

Read the full article “7 Ways To Get Quality Backlinks

That’s a good article on places to get some quality backlinks. We agree with all of his methods EXCEPT link exchanges. Link exchanges can be very risky, which is one reason he may suggest that you put the other person’s link on another website. This can help you from getting penalized by Google on your site, but at the same time make upset the person your are exchanging links with.

In Conclusion

So there you have it. As the search engines become smarter, quality must be a key part of you SEO campaigns. The search engines are understanding your content and when it sucks, they just won’t rank it. After all, it is Google’s aim to return the best possible information for a person performing a search for a keyword or keyword phrase as to keep users using their engine over their competition.