SEO: Why Quality Reins Over Quantity

Over the recent years, various professional studies and executives have ranked SEO is the most effective online marketing scheme a firm can implement in today’s digital world. The most successful firms out there have recognized that SEO is essential for success, but the disciplines behind it are constantly changing, to the degree that strategies which were once powerful can now be actively damaging to a website. Anyone who spends any time learning the details of online marketing should already be aware that we have moved forward into a new era for SEO, ushered in by Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird. To some people, the changes are fantastic advancements, whereas others have seen them as a cause for despair. Generally, the reaction you have will speak to the practices you have implemented within your SEO strategy up to now. Either way, successful firms will need to adapt if they want to continue being effective.

Google: Privileges and Punishments

The ‘quality over quantity’ ethos that Google has begun to champion, manifests itself in various critical ways across online marketing. For example, we’ve all bared witness to blog posts where keywords don’t just simply lead the content – they completely overwhelm it, until there’s practically nothing less. Key-word cramming has turned various articles and posts into streams of nonsense gibberish that have washed away better content in the past. However, keyword optimization of this nature isn’t going to cut it anymore, and Google is going to start returning results for ‘semantic’ queries instead that mimic regular speech. As always, Google will be searching for content that is relevant, recent and authoritative, but if you want to appeal to the semantic algorithms, you’ll need to make sure that your content is geared towards search-friendly terms that appear naturally throughout. Remember, alongside the consumer-facing content that you produce, you should also be optimizing your Metadata with semantic keywords to reinforce the relevance of your website, and enhance its search engine presence.

Link building

A similar approach also applies to link building. Strategies from the past put more emphasis on volume instead of quality, whereas today, dozens of poor quality links will only work against your website in terms of rankings. The number of links that you generate is nowhere near as important as the kind of links that are generated – links that are obtained from highly-trafficked, authentic and informative websites. Also spammy link building has always been considered a short-sighted way of gaining traffic, they are now actively destructive, and if you have low-quality links, you will need to remove them before your website sees any ranking improvements. Focus on earning your links through quality substance and merit.

Google’s Incentive

Search engine creators such as Google have no intention to create an indefinite, static set of rules when it comes to optimization. Instead, Google wants to constantly deliver an increasingly reliable way for users to get the results that they’re searching for. This will mean that the law of SEO is constantly going to change and evolve – but the spirit of that law is destined to remain fundamentally the same. Search engines are always going to provide privilege to content that is useful, reliable and engaging.