Published by Jon Roberts
Website Grants

Content is king is the old adage. It hasn’t changed.

Over the next few months we are going to see a lot of changes in the way that search results are found and presented. You may have noticed recently Google have started mixing with your standard search results shopping results, map results, video results and many other items; you may also have noticed the Google Wiki. Google Wiki allows you to personalise your search results.

OK, so what? Now more than ever content is vital to your website. At one time a website could acheive a high rank on a given search engine by having good keyword density and good on page optimisation, or by having a huge number of quality links or both. Whilst these are still important i.e. you should still have a website that has been fully optimised to ensure that complies with accessibility standards (W3 Consortium Guidelines) and Search Engine Compliency Rules (see the individual search engines i.e. the gang of three Google, Yahoo and Live). You won’t go far wrong with websites that have a similar theme/industry/content as yours, with a Google PageRank of 4 or more linking to your site either.

Now more than ever however, how high your website ranks in any given search engine will depend on its ability to provide quality content that visitors would be interested in. Content such as video and articles are going to give your website an edge in the search market of the future. You should be writing your website with the view of improving your visitors experience with content that is useful and informative (and maybe even entertaining!). I would also suggest that you regularly change/update your content, this will keep your visitors coming back time and again; and if your content is decent may even have your visitors bursting with anticipation!

Whatever your view, the days of writing content for search engines is long dead, Web 2.0 has made a web viewing public a lot more savvy about the content they want. Link building still has an important role to play, but content and well optimised websites are vital.

Just a slight sidetrack (apologies) – I was recently approached by an SEO company to set up three way link exchange, they told me that standard link building is no longer pulling the results it once did and the best way to overcome this is to build three way links. In my opinion this is SPAM, I think that you will find that Google is able to trace up to six way links, so it won’t be fooled. The best way to overcome any perceived slow down in the effectiveness of recipricol link exchanges is summed up with three simple words: content, content, content.