"If you provide relevant, meaty, useful, original content—each one of those factors being critical—Google will find you, rank you and so will your particular audiences. "
No area of marketing is more prone to hype and doubtful practices than SEO engineering.
Persona's way of handling search engine optimizing is to create sites and content the Google way.
Relevance is Key
Google built its algorithms for page ranking on relevance. In the beginning Google used inbound links as "votes" for relevancy—until grey and black practices in SEO emerged, spamming a system designed to make Google a powerful too for users.
For the same reason Google aggressively deranks the spammers, we believe the only valid approach to SEO is organic, content-based relevancy. If you provide relevant, meaty, useful, original content —each one of those factors being critical —Google will find you, rank you and so will your particular audiences.
Let Google Do Its Work
Google struggles against grey and black practices for the same reason you should avoid them. Your prospective audiences—via Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines—want the most relevant, quality content. Instead of avoiding quality and the solid work required to create optimal content, grey and black spam SEO practitioners try to "fool" or trick the Search Engines. When audiences land on a site that clearly "tricked them" it damages brand. When Google discovers this practice, the site is deranked or reduced in rank.
Let Google do it's work, by providing content that is:
- Relevant: the content should speak to your audiences needs. It should have tangible value. It should not attempt to hoodwink. Keywords come naturally. Spamming the system doesn't work over the long term.
- Meaty: Google, and your users, like meaty content. This doesn't just refer to length, although this is part of it, since "skimpy" pages tend not to index well, but to content that is not fluff and contains real value.
- Useful: Are you providing useful information, or just information to make the page meaty? In the pursuit of "meaty" remember usefulness.
- Original: For good reason, search engines give lower or even penalizing ranks to duplicated content. Copying content—with or without permission—is a sure way to raise search engine red flags. We discourage exerpting and ping backing, unless the excerpt is wrapped in a substantial body of original, relevant content.
- Timely: Have you ever noticed Google will place a website with a low rank ahead of a high rank on one of your daily searches? This is because timeliness, the effort to provide recent info on the topic, is a key factor in determining relevant results.
It's all about the user experience for people who use search engines. If they find relevant info without frustration, and that information is on your site, you win. There is no other way to win in the long term.
Link Strategy?
What about link strategy? Although links still count—albeit without the weight they did even a year ago—links should come organically. This is because Google places the same value on links as content: relevant and useful. If links come from spam farms, phoney directories, pages with cloned content and other obvious ploys, Google's algorithm understands this for what it is: spam.
Persona Approach
We put our significant content marketing resources and various relevant, legitimate methods to help boost your qualified traffic. Our content team builds meaty, valid, relevant content for you. We find as ask for legitimate, relevant high quality links to that content. It's time consuming, but there are no shortcuts. Our Blogertize methodology has significant SEO benefits, beyond it's credibility and marketing mission.