Tag: content is the king

We often hear seo experts say that “content is the king”, meaning that you produce unique and valuable content, and every thing else is taken care of! Nothing could be more wrong than this! We discuss a few cases as to how it could be wrong here:

1. Assume that you had created a unique and worthy content for your thing of interest. It was well researched and produced after a thorough work and published on your web page. Now, two things could happen: One is that no search engine could find your content at all, remember that there are millions of websites and billions of web pages and your unique content might be some where deep inside the Internet. Second thing that could happen is that the search engines found your unique content, but tagged them as “duplicate” content and probably penalized the web page for publishing duplicate content, and the silver lining is that you would never knew that the content was penalized by major search engines such as Google, simply because no one is going to tell you about it!

2. There is what is known as black hat SEO, which uses dubious means of techniques to attain first place (or say, first page) in search engine rankings. If you just take care of your web resources with strong passwords and dedicated servers, it may not be sufficient. The irony is that a website could be hacked even without breaking into the website! Yes, it is called off-page SEO techniques. In other words, some one can break the seo ranking of your web page or even get it black listed by using off-page  black hat SEO, and even Google can’t find it! A couple of examples are given earlier in the blog and the links are provided below for the reference of the readers:

Irrelevant Results in Google Search – A Case Study

Irrelevant Results in Google Search – Contd..

If you had thought that Google is mightier and no one can possibly break it, you had mistaken just like me! After a long study, I painfully understood, black hat seo webmasters routinely game search engines, including Google! It is also quite possible, you wouldn’t be knowing it at all!

So, what is the fix now?

Simple: The King requires a Queen! As in famous Indian-origin game of chess, a queen with multitude of skills is required to protect and to promote the king. What are the skills required by the Queen? These skills are briefly listed below:

• On-page SEO
  • Development of responsive web pages, so that the web pages render properly on various devices using different operating systems and screen sizes, and browsers using different versions.
  • Proper meta tags like title, description, canonical, etc
  • Incorporation of analytics such as Google analytics
  • Elimination or identification of duplicate content with proper care
  • Configuring htaccess, robots.txt, sitemap, etc. to ensure that the content is delivered properly to the users.
  • Hardening of the server and the website resources
• Off-page SEO
  • According to Moz.com, “Off-site SEO” (also called “off-page SEO”) refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs)”. Off page SEO has become quite important these days, just as the on-page seo. With the advent of social signals and black-hat SEO, off-page SEO could not be ignored. Important off-site SEO techniques are given below:
    • Backlink building to your web page from other related domain sites
    • Press releases and article submissions to PR and articles sites
    • Blogging on your blog site or on related blog sites
    • Social signals, like posting on your or friends facebook page, or G+ page or twitter, etc.
  • Now, it is also important that you monitor your backlinks! Many search engines like Google may penalize for unnatural back links to the extent, that your web page might become non-existant for all practical purposes! To attend to this, you may need to do the following:
    • Use Google Webmaster Tools (GMT) regularly to see who is linking to your site (or web page) and ensure that it’s a genuine link (contextual) and not spammy (through the eyes of search engines).
    • Get the backlinks removed by requesting the offending websites’ owners to remove your linkbacks, and if it fails, requesting a disavow via GWT (short for Google Webmaster Tools)
    • Regularly checking for duplicate content on the Internet and reporting the same to Google and/or other search engines as required
    • Ensuring that your website is indexed properly and monitoring the same for consistency from time to time

The above are to mention a few, and just Google for more comprehensive list of activities. Obviously, it’s not something that one individual could do while managing his/her primary activity (that of writing your own content).

The need for capable SEO specialists has become most demanding with recent advances in search results ranking, and marketing.