Even when I hire marketing professionals, I like to stay on top of things. Why? Because the market is saturated with freelancers all claiming to be experts and my way to separate the chaff from the wheat is by learning and knowing just enough to know when someone is a professional or not. I make it a habit of digging a bit myself and it is during one of my diggings that I came across Google's SEO guide and started looking into it.
(https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide?hl=en)
I'll spare the technical aspects of SEO but I would like to focus on some marketing highlights and kick some myths along with it. I'll start with the marketing highlight:
Google Values Content Over SEO
Yes, believe it or not, and I'll quote, "Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here". We all know that content is king, but with all the digitalization, there's a sense that greater results may be hiding in a backlink, another tag, another link, external, internal, and whatnot. It's always great to hear that the king is back!
As we all know, content has to be written with the customer in mind, their needs, and pain points, and ultimately is well written and provides added value to the users/clients. Google too recommends "optimizing content for your users, not search engines". Searching keywords and integrating them into your content is fine, however, make sure they support your content versus your content supporting searched keywords.
Let's Break Some Myths
With this in mind, let's break some SEO myths. According to Google, you should avoid:
· Inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines that are annoying or nonsensical to users. Amen to that.
· Having blocks of text like "frequent misspellings used to reach this page" add little value for
users.
When it comes to links and anchor text, here's what you need to avoid:
· Generic anchor text like "page", "article", or "click here".
· Off-topic text that has no relation to the content of the page linked to.
· Writing long anchor text, such as a lengthy sentence or short paragraph of text.
· Using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just for search engines.
· Creating unnecessary links that don't help with the user's navigation of the site.
Summary
The "king" is back and this time looks like it is focused on authenticity and loyalty. Authentic content goes far beyond SEO, provided it stays loyal to its users and the business it represents rather than work itself around keywords and exaggerated hashtags, links, and other tactics we are all guilty of. So if your budget is tight, and the question is SEO or content? Start with content.
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