Quality Content is the New Black

Have you ever read a webpage or blog post that was just very engaging?  What do you do when that happens?  So why should it be any different for other readers when they visit your website? I am going to use the terms "website" and "blog" interchangeably going forward.

I get it.  We all want to sell things online.  Other people's products, products that we created, ecommerce, etc.  I understand the motivation.  But if you come across a sales page on the web, and you are not buying anything at that point and time?  What is your reaction?

People have a thirst for information and they want it immediately.  People always want information fast but with the internet now they can demand it.​  But they want that information to be great.  There is so much competition on the web that they can demand that as well.  They vote with their browsers.  If they stay on your website for any length of time then you got a good vote.  And Google votes with you too!

This will probably be a very strange thing for you to hear as to how you can get Google to give love to your website.  But it's the truth and it's something that many people do not grasp the concept.  This can be used to your competitive advantage.

If you want Google to love your website then you will want to write content that people will want to read.  You also want these people to visit other articles that you have written on your website. This seems all too obvious but you'd be amazed at how many website owners ignore this.  It all goes back to the "I want to sell stuff" with respect to their website.

The problem is most people try to cater to Google. They read things from self proclaimed experts that you have to incorporate such and such an SEO technique and Google will rank you highly in the search engines.  This kind of thing used to work too!  But Google slapped the pants off of many of these techniques.

But they will assign authority to you if they start discovering that people are staying and returning to your website.  And the way to do that is to consistenly produce quality content.  End of story!​

There are several tools that are available to content creators today.  Some of them are pretty good.  Many of them are downright awful. 

Any resource that has to do with article spinning, auto blogging, or some other scheme, should never be considered.  They won't produce quality content.  Some may produce average content but that is the best you can expect.  And you run the risk of getting flagged for duplicate content.

Keyword research is a great way to get ideas for content but one fantastic way is to scour through forums and other authority blogs.  Read through many of the forums that are related to your market.  This is prime pickings for topics that people care about.

Question and answer sites like Quora and Ask.com are great ways to see what kind of information people seek.  Remember with this and forums/blogs you want to fact check much of what is being told as usually anyone is allowed to participate in these exchanges.  The last thing you want is to have someone flag you because you published a "fact" and it was proved to be wrong.  You will lose credibility quickly with that.

I think you can get a feel for the answer on your own.  But I'll explore this anyway.

I already touched upon the likes of tools that spin content or auto blog. Others are pulling content from low rated article websites and scraping services.  All these serve to do is get you banned with Google.  Further your readers aren't going to like you very much either.

For those unfamiliar, article spinning is software that takes a piece of content, like an article, and seeks out the adjectives and replaces them with similar words or synonyms.  If you have ever read an article that was produced by spinners, you will quickly learn that you have to do a lot of editing because it is very unreadable.

Auto blogging and content scraping will give you a lot of content but it will content that is already available on the web.  Google knows this and will flag your website for duplicate content.

If it seems to good to be true with respect to creating content, it probably is.​

I am not against outsourcing but more often than not you get what you pay for.  People offering to write your content for you are a dime a dozen, and many of them will be from countries that do not speak your native tongue.  So you'll likely be putting on your editing cap.

If you are going to consider outsourcing here's a tip.  Have an initial budget of about $300.  Hire 15 writers by first checking references, etc.  Do this from the higher end content producing websites.  Then have those 15 writers write an article and pay them full price (whatever that happens to be).  Then take the best 3 writers and use them all the time.

You may be cringing at the though of spending that much money up front.  But trust me.  The trial and error approach will cost you much more over the long run.  And if it's not through money it will certainly be through time spent editing the mistakes of these lower end content producers.​

Remember too, that outsourcing doesn't have to be a long term gig.  You can do it once, forget about it for a while and revisit it sometime in the future. You control the situation which is great.

You may be familiar with algorithm changes that Google has made over the past several years.  They were labeled Penguin, Panda, etc.  And there will be more to come.  But no matter how many changes Google makes, quality content will never be within the list of things that will penalize a website.

Google wants awesome search results.  They want relevant pages to appear when people search their engine.  The only way that will happen is by continuing to rank highly those pages that are high content, i.e., those that get searches to stay and return.

Why would Google, or any other search engine, for that matter, take that away?  It would kill the internet.  Searches would all of a sudden be really bad that people would abandon search engines.  So it is highly unlikely that Google would ever penalize people for writing quality content.