If you read a few of my articles, entries or forums posts you’ll quickly learn a few things about me and my general take on SEO.
I’m not a links junkie. In fact, I despise link building campaigns. Particularly reciprocal link building campaigns. That topic though is probably better discussed in it’s own blog entry.
Today I wish to *briefly* discuss the power of content. Today’s motivation comes from looking at the website traffic stats for a couple of clients. One is actually a website maintenance client of mine who I recommended a website re-design for. The site had sort of been managed by a number of different people for the better part of six years, and so things were a bit unorganized. There were also some roadblocks to high search engine rankings– such as:
- pages redirecting to pages that redirected to other pages
- broken links
- the same generic title tag for each page
Anyhow so in re-desiging the site I made sure to correct these issues. The site had a ton of really great content, it was just very difficult for a user to find it all – and was even more difficult for a spider to find it!
Overall its a very modest-sized site, but over the past couple of days search engine referrals appear to have at least doubled their normal rate, and possibly increased even a bit more than that.
With all the talk we hear about linking campaigns and reverse engineering search engine algorithms so as to determine the perfect mix of each on page and off page element, we sometimes forget that at the very core of everything is the question “What is this website about?” By having great content you can quickly and easily mix in a few nice title tags and a couple of links and get yourself some decent rankings for some more targeted keyword search phrases. I think many webmasters would indeed be better served by spending a bit more of their time generating great original content, even at the expense of a few inbound links…