You’re familiar with “old school” SEO right?  Link building, keyword links, in article links, on site optimisation… Frankly, a lot of it still works, and Google doesn’t mind if you reasonably optimise your site so it can be crawled and indexed easily.  Where Google has the issue is where you push things into over optimisation and try to trick it.

Although some people are still ranking well and making lots of money with those old tricks, but that’s just what they are, tricks.  They might continue to work for six months, twelve months, but who knows how much longer?  And who knows what will happen to your site when all that SEO catches up with you.  Because now…

It’s All About Content

Before the Panda update came along, content was a commodity.  You could do fantastically well with poor quality content.  But Panda changed all that by putting the focus on quality content, and that’s become ever more important since.

So simply put – fantastic content works as a search engine optimisation strategy, without you even having to think about SEO!  All you need to do is create content that your readers love, and that helps to attract new readers to you (through social shares and links from other sites), and Google will notice those shares, those links, and how much time people spend on your site, and reward your great content with more readers.  Easy, right?

So What Is Google Really Looking For?

Google is looking to provide relevance and quality to the people using their engine to search.  The better and more accurate the results it gives searchers, the more likely people are to keep using Google, so Google keeps its audience and keeps making money from advertising.

There’s a reason Bing is a distant second!  If Bing was as good (or better) than Google, Google might be in trouble.  But right now, and for the foreseeable future, Google is the clear winner in providing relevant and quality results.

Don’t Rely on SEO

Traffic through search is great, and for better or worse Google is considered by many to be the gatekeeper to content online.  Without Google, a lot of great content would remain undiscovered. So getting search traffic can do wonders for your business, and more great content means more search traffic (generally anyway).  However, depending just on Google’s whims can make your business weak and unstable.  Many a business that depended 100% on SEO for traffic disappeared after the Panda and Penguin updates.

So amazing content, and distributing and promoting that amazing content also generates traffic through social channels, from links from other sites, and even people just talking about your site positively.

Even though content remains king, and will continue to be, your competition is also hard at work developing great content.  So you’ll have to work harder and smarter than they do, to reap the rewards.  But the rewards are huge, so the effort is well worth it.