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author
Sudhir Sharma
M Posted 9 years ago
t 3 min read

There is a reason that content marketers and SEOs place such a high emphasis on content, but it might not be what most people think. The truth is that SEO does not favor content for the sake of content. It’s not just any content that will garner traffic and get rank. There’s a lot of noise out there when it comes to content, but deep, rich content is what drives organic traffic. It gets you links and social signals, and these factors make you look good to search engines and usually lead to favorable rankings in the Google algorithm. No one wants to read junk that is full of spam links and meaningless text.

Overall, good content is what enhances the user experience, and that’s why Google and other search engines rank good content higher. Above all, it’s important to realize that more content does not equal good content. Don’t be part of the crowd that turns what can be said in three sentences into a 2,400-word exposé or a piece that disguises what is obvious as something profound.

What is good content

A deluge of low-quality content is causing internet users to put up barriers and raise their expectations, so those seeking to be heard have to know how to get past those barriers and meet expectations—and it’s done with good content. And what used to be enough won’t be enough anymore. An e-book once every four or six months may have been enough last year, but this year you might need an e-book every month to keep up with everything else being published on the Internet. Everyone is competing for an increasingly scarce resource—people’s attention. When your content is mixed in with all the other content, it will start looking like something people have gotten really good at ignoring: advertising. That is, unless your content is really good. So become a thought leader. Be an intelligent contributor to conversations around issues that really matter. 

Optimize good content for better SEO

It’s also important that you optimize your content, because just like Google favors rich content over poor content, optimized content is favored over non-optimized content. One way to do this is by coding the open graph markup. This will optimize the content for social sharing which will, in turn, drive more traffic and get more people to discover the content. When more people find your content, it’s more likely to earn good content links from influencers down the line. Another way to optimize content is to internally link your content with your other pieces of content as well as to your landing pages. This will allow your content pieces to pass more of their authority to the rest of your site—especially to your landing pages.

Make sure, however, that this is done with the benefit of the users in mind rather than to strictly boost your SEO efforts. Google’s algorithms are becoming more and more aware of malicious internal linking, so if users don’t benefit, steer away. Content may be king, but good content is emperor. Google and other search engines care about user experience, so create content with the user in mind. If there isn’t a need, don’t produce it. With more and more bad content out there, it’s becoming clear that the biggest threat to content marketing is content marketing. Stand out from the rest by creating content worthy of users’ time.