Is content still king?

[arthurm]

Having spent waaayyy too much on SEO with precious little to show for it, while adding maybe 1 - 2 articles a week to my site, I'm thinking of forgetting the social life for a while and just putting out content all day every day, (as far as the day job will allow.) Is content still king? Can I finally get my site noticed this way?
Arthur

[BingoHouse]

Nothing is truly "king." Quality, relevant content is only useful if people link to it (and strong backlinks are only effective if they lead to quality content). You can post a new 800-word article every day and still see no significant increase in SERPs - that's just how it is.

The best approach to take is a wholesome one - write original content, be vigilant about meta tags and alt attributes, and accumulate a diverse profile of incoming links. If this still doesn't work, consider narrowing down to a smaller, less competitive niche, or investing in an aged domain with an existing reputation. Google has simply gotten too good, their algorithm now includes more than 200 weighted factors and it's best to address all of the (known) ones one-by-one.

[baldidiot]

In my opinion you should focus on high quality, interesting and unique content. And by unique I mean both in therms of duplicate content and actually novel content - not something that there are already 5000 articles on around the web.

One high quality 1,000 word article is way better than 10+ filler articles.

[GFPC]

This is by far one of the best comments I have read on the GPWA in a very long time!! Well said!

Respect!

Nothing is truly "king." Quality, relevant content is only useful if people link to it (and strong backlinks are only effective if they lead to quality content). You can post a new 800-word article every day and still see no significant increase in SERPs - that's just how it is.

The best approach to take is a wholesome one - write original content, be vigilant about meta tags and alt attributes, and accumulate a diverse profile of incoming links. If this still doesn't work, consider narrowing down to a smaller, less competitive niche, or investing in an aged domain with an existing reputation. Google has simply gotten too good, their algorithm now includes more than 200 weighted factors and it's best to address all of the (known) ones one-by-one.

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

Great thread!

Here's my checklist I give to my content people;

- Pick 5-keywords/keyword clusters (eg. casino, live casino, online casino, live casino online, live online casino dealer) The reason for this is that one of the few easily manipulated algo parameter is latent semantics, or in Layman's terms 'relativity'. A few mentions of a keyword doesn't cut it these days. I use the example that if I were writing about trucks(US) to a global audience I would includes terms like 'lorie(UK)' and 'ute(AU)' as well as 'Pontiac(US)' and 'Vauxhall(UK - an even cheaper Ford)'. You become an authority and you can't buy this for any money.

- The article needs to be a minimum 500 words, so pace yourself. (Thanks Panda!)

- Use at least one image. Name the file its in, the image itself, the alt tag and the title tag, as well as the mouse over if possible, different variations of your targeted term.

- Learn the lingo. If you expect top spot then you need to do the homework. As BingoHouse said,

"The best approach to take is a wholesome one - write original content"

Well said

- No more than 2 outbound links (and not in the headers) with alternating text and landing pages. If you have a not-for-profit or other organisation that you can link to (especially if its in wikipedia) , link to them. I do Casino and Poker sites, I link to GambleAware as most do. When you link to an authority you become an authority in some respect.

- Use your meta tags. I use everything. I even use GPS metas and keywords. I don't care if the big 3 use them or not. They don't hurt and the .01% of traffic I do get from 3rd party engines like 7Search and DogPile converts 10x the rate the traffic from the others do.

- Use H1 and H2 tags. These should be, or should include, your target kw/kw phrase.

- Your page title should also be, or include your target kw/kw phrase. If you have to use your brand in the title (eg.Ace Live Casino - Live Hot Costa Rican Dealers) rather than just you kw (Live Hot Costa Rican Dealers) then just use it on the homepage. The extra words dilute the effect the title has in search metrics.

- USE MOUSE-OVERS!

- Don't use auto-generated URL's unless they use the kw as the file name. Linux servers use an htaccess file and there are many 'work-arounds' to make this happen.

- Use you kw or kw variation in the 1st sentence. In most cases this will end up being the snippet that shows in search.

- Post the content and immediately add it to your xml sitemap and manually submit the page and the sitemap through Webmaster Central (especially after you've spent the time doing the above)

- Use Onlywire or similar software that automatically posts 40+ social bookmarks to your page. This will provoke indexation and stake your claim to the content you have worked on so hard to write.

- If your site isn't set up like a Wordpress blog or the like be sure to link to the page from your home/index page.

- Use an author tag/snippet as well. If its a good article (lol - or even if its not), evil black hatters will scrape your site. Most are lazy so the won't bother to edit you out (but some will though) and this is a good thing.

- Post links using your kw/kw phrase on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Mr.Wong. I'm not sure what gets crawled first; your site, Twitter or Facebook, but I'm prone to say Twitter. Either way I set up a campaign through TweetAdder for 1-2 post per day immediately after I take the content live. To be fair, after 3 hours minimum writing this content I do both until I can test this and figure out what's the best line of attack. Unfortunately there are only 48 1/2 hrs in a day.

The hardest and most frustrating part of following the "Content is King" brainwarp that Google rams down our throats is that if they spider a scraper site before they do your site then you become the plagiarist.

Spend an equal amount of time on claiming your content as you do creating it.

Good luck to ya and I hope this helps.

GaryTheScubaGuy

[arthurm]

Thanks everyone, I'm glad I started an interesting thread. Some great advice from you all. Gary, as always, your words have inspired me to try new methods of getting my site noticed.
Arthur