Optimizing Web Content With Quality

This isn’t really a one-post subject, but it is meant to give everyone who is giving it a go on their own a bit of advice on how best to go about it.

After a very long time in the industry, I’ve come to the somewhat obvious conclusion that quality wins out over quantity.  The conclusion doesn’t seem like an obvious one when you start reading SEO literature or start listening to a few SEO experts speak.  Many of them profess that multiple articles on the same subject will act as “linkbait” and encourage search engines to link to your site.  They’re not wrong.  However, this attracts the wrong kind of attention.

Posting a bunch of bad content on your site is the equivalent of dressing up and sauntering by a construction site – you’re bound to get a lot of dates, but they won’t add up to much more than a bunch of names and no meaningful relationship will come of it.  The key is to develop a quality relationship not only with the search engines, but with your readers who will act as evangelists for your site and Twitter, Digg and otherwise share what they find.  Real eyeballs are the key.

While I know they work, I have an ethical issue with creating landing pages for sites because I feel that they dilute the web in general.  If I see a “landing page” on a site, I purposely will not buy something from there because I feel that they must have something to hide in order to employ such an obvious sales gimmick.  I have a feeling that I am not alone in this distaste for landing pages, although it is the rare writer who won’t do them at all.  If a client asks me to, I will,  but under advisement that successful sites on the internet are moving away from such language and into more quality content that appeals to social networkers.

I also believe in giving Google what it wants.  Google and the rest of the search engines want good, quality content that has been linked to by reliable sources.  The only way to get this without tricks is to actually sit down and do it, something many SEO experts write off as too time-consuming or troublesome.  If you have a hard time writing yourself, that’s what Working Web Copy is here to help you with.  If you don’t, insert some solid facts in your site and people will keep coming back.  Sometimes they’ll even bring their friends.  They’ll link to you and voila – Google has been satisfied.  Your natural rankings rise.  That’s SEO without the tricks that go the way of the dodo every time Google changes their algorithms.

Got any questions about optimizing web content?  E-mail me or hit me up on Twitter at @workingwebcopy.