Blogging & content creation: essential for SEO

If you want to build your site's search engine traffic, creating quality content is a must.

Not all that long ago, backlinks were a major ranking factor and this encouraged many businesses to ditch quality in favour of quantity. By 2012, paid links and content farms were becoming a major problem for the search engine – and one it was keen to snuff out.

Google's content clean up

Google's Penguin and Panda updates proved the commitment of the search giant when it comes to cleaning up content. The updates penalised websites with spammy content, and many businesses that were investing in poor content and paid backlinks had to rethink their SEO strategy.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, recently revealed in a video that backlinks are set to become even less important – although the process may take some time. The good news is that when a backlink has been earned properly (through hard work and quality posts), it will still count towards your rankings.

By sweeping away shortcuts and quick wins, Google has put the focus back on interesting content and useful blogs.

Quality content remains king

Cutts explained that when Google is assessing a page, it's now doing so from the point of view of an expert user. While the links to the page still play a part in that assessment, as does the reputation of the page and of the site itself, the quality of the content is the most important factor.

This focus on well-written pages is only set to grow as Google becomes even better at understanding natural language and boosting its conversational search efforts. As these mature, Google will start to use natural language to determine whether the author is an expert on a subject on a page-by-page basis.

Bling up your blogging strategy

If you don't already have a robust blogging and content strategy, now is the time to put one in place. Google is looking for websites that can prove their authority and content that's good enough for other websites to want to link to it organically – so get writing.

For more help creating quality content, let Bloomtools Content Writing Services provide you with relevant, expert blogs or news pieces every month. Chat about your options or find out more from your local Bloomtools consultant.