Posts by Darren Jamieson

The act of adding content to websites for ranking purposes is relatively new in the world of SEO. Many SEO companies have only recently begun offering content writing as a service for their clients, to complement their more traditional Internet marketing services.

As a result of content being relatively new, the perception of content remains unclear in the minds of many. After all, most people understand the concept of search engine optimisation. You make changes to a website to ensure that it’s optimised well for search engines, so that it ranks better in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

It’s a process that is generally done once to a website and is then supported by an off-page campaign that aids the website’s rankings. While the intricacies of SEO remain very complex, the notion of SEO is fairly well known.

Why then is content so shrouded in confusion? What is essentially a very simple thing to do (in contrast to SEO) is still relatively hard to understand for many people, including Internet marketing companies, again in contrast to SEO.

The reason you should add content to your website is very simple. The more content you add, the more often your site will be indexed, the more pages you will have to rank within Google, the more search terms you will rank for and, ultimately, the more traffic you will receive. The key though – and this is the part that seems very hard for some people to grasp – is to update your content regularly. If you update your site every day for a month and then leave it for six weeks, you’re wasting your time. If you add nothing for a month and then upload twenty pages at once, you’re wasting your time.

To put it as simply as possible (and here comes the science bit) Google has become the most successful search engine in the world by offering its users the most relevant results to their queries. If Google offered up useless websites to a user’s search, the user wouldn’t use Google again (which is what MSN, Live.com, or whatever it’s called this week does).

Now, when a website is SEOd, the SEO work tells Google what the website is about. It lets Google know what the website should be classified as and what the context of the website is. What content does is offer Google pages of information which it can use to show its users answers to their search queries. As Google wants to offer its users information, you’re helping Google fulfil its purpose and helping it to make money from its sponsored links.

Without regular content, Google has no real reason to offer your website as an answer to a user’s search.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

If your primary goal out of life is to get your website banned by Google then there is a quick, easy and painless way to ensure that Google penalises your website. All you have to do is visit any of your competitors’ websites, copy their content and paste it onto your own site.

What could be easier?

You could even visit some article sites (of which there are many) and steal as much content as you can before pasting it onto your website. This is almost guaranteed to get your website banned by Google.

Why am I giving this advice? Well, it would seem from looking around the Internet that many people are on a fast track to a Google banning, going out of their way to get their websites thrown out of the index. They seem to understand the importance of adding content to their websites, knowing that it will help their rankings, but are blissfully unaware that by stealing other people’s content they’re asking Google to throw their website out.

Yes, you need to have lots of content on your site in order to improve your rankings, but this content has to be unique. If you just add the same content that you find on other websites, you’re making your website a duplicate of other sites, which Google doesn’t want to see, or offer as a result to its users.

What you need to think about is why Google works, and how it makes money. Google makes money through sponsored advertising, so the more people who use Google to search, the more money Google makes. If Google offered nothing but duplicate results, nobody would use Google to search for information, so Google wouldn’t make any money. This is why Google filters out the duplicate results. This is why your website will be filtered out of the index if you copy content from other sites.

There is no quick and easy fix to adding content for better rankings, but there is a quick and easy way to get your website banned.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer