It is true that exceptional content will help you maintain top rankings in spite of Google’s updates. However, that’s NOT the whole picture. You need to use your exceptional content in certain ways if you intend to gain and maintain top rankings. Here are things you shouldn’t miss…
1. Only Top Quality Content On-site
The Panda Update taught many webmasters one thing: It is better to have 50 great pages alone than to have 50 great pages and another 50 half-baked pages. But think about it: It makes sense. What would this help you achieve?
You will enjoy low bounce rates as your visitors will be fully engaged with your content across your different pages. You will experience higher conversion rates because your message meets the needs of your target audience. You will get social signals (tweets, pins, likes, reblogs, etc) without even asking. You will attract top quality links from webmasters who believe that your articles, videos or podcasts are valuable to their audience. You will get links to a wide range of pages which means your rankings will spread across many keywords. The benefits are many. Therefore, make sure that you make enough provision for top quality content in your budget.
2. Only Top Quality Content Off-site
One would think that all you need to do is publish a great article for the whole world to head over to your site. However, your article will remain unnoticed if you don’t take any further actions. You just have to build links to your article. You have to tell the world about it. You can do this is by building links through article marketing, guest blogging, press releases and submitting videos on sites like Youtube. So all you need are links, right? Wrong! You need links from other sites that already have an audience if you want to survive updates now and in the distant future.
Think about it: How difficult is it for any webmaster to game the system by building links from pages that no one really sees or visits? All they’ll have to do is just build a cheap private network and they can pick top rankings. Yes, it might work for now in a number of cases but it definitely won’t for a very long time. Google tracks the quality of links you get to your site. Yes, they may NOT know how you acquired them. However, they can easily tell if a set of links can easily be manipulated. So what are the things they are likely to pay more attention to in the future?
They will look at the activities on the linking page. How many tweets, likes, pins and links does your linking page have? Yes, you can build links to your links (tiered link building).
However, there’s a better way…
Deliver top quality content on sites you get your links from and make sure they only take top quality content (Your hard work could be wiped out easily if enough people include linking sites as bad sites with the new disavow tool). It doesn’t matter if it is your mininet, private network or a third-party site. You need to ensure that they have content that engages visitors. Such will attract social signals and links that will boost your search engine rankings today. But more importantly, you can be sure that you’ll be immune from new updates in the future.
Why am I so sure? Google will cease to be the top search engine if it ever implements algorithms that penalize sites that have only top quality content. Remember, Google thrives or sinks on the strength of its search results.
