The word on the street is: “Content is King”.

If you’ve ever doubted it before, then this should set you straight. The speculators and rumour-mongers are whispering quite loudly now that Google has once again altered its algorithm to place ever more emphasis on sites that contain lots of quality, unique and regularly updated content.

That means sites that have been up until now spending lots of time and money on harvesting as many back-links as they can to boost their PR are going to start to feel the wrath of the Google monster as it starts trawling through the world wide web and sifting out the sites that have lots of SEO and back-links but poor quality, static content and penalizing them.

Good!

On this I’m all for what Google are trying to do. That’s to force website owners to give good quality sites to their readers by rewarding their hard work and efforts to really give a service that readers will use.

Their search algorithms are getting better and better all the time.

As recently as a couple of years ago, you could still enter a search keyword and end up with pages full of irrelevant sites all hogging the top pages. That horror story is systematically being consigned to the past with ever more sophisticated methods of bringing much more relevant results for search keywords on the top pages and all the irrelevant garbage being relegated to the nether-regions.

Good!

What does all this mean for the website owner who is using the web to make money?

Well, it just means that the days of putting up highly SEO’d and strongly linked but poor quality sites full of ads and little else just to hog the top pages of the search engines are over. Now, if you want to make money from your sites, you have to work hard at filling them with good quality, relevant and readable content! That doesn’t include the mechanically written articles that article creating software spews out, either. They’re on to that trick too!

No, your content has to be written by a human being in a language that the reader will not only understand, but get something from and enjoy reading in the process. It has to be informative, relevant, on-topic and above all else, interesting.

It doesn’t take much figuring out to see that blogs are the way to go with this.

Blogs are exactly what the search engines like to see - they have everything the newly reconfigured algorithms praise and reward sites for. That means lots of informative, human-written content that is regularly updated and added to with ever more fresh, interesting content. They have to be this way, or no one would read them, which would defeat the object of creating one in the first place.

So blog away and keep your readers coming back for more. As your blog builds it’s readership, so too will the search engines be helping you out as well by pushing you up to the high pages as long as you’ve got your on-site SEO configured properly. So make sure your main keywords are prominent in your post, as well as in your blogs meta tags and titles. Back-links are still important, so you should make sure you have plenty of these, by visiting other blogs that, like this one have a “do follow” policy and posting comments with a link back to your own blog.

Now the humble blogger can stand up against the top marketers by having a level playing field - something that until now, they have never truly had the benefit of.

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

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