We do quite a lot of content work for businesses across the non English speaking world and specifically the Indian subcontinent, mostly because they need excellent grammar, spelling and context all packaged up with the right keywords and anchor links correctly place in the content. This all true whether the content is written, image, video ebooks, infographics or any other targeted format.
The instructions that we receive however can be quite eye watering. It is clear that the message that Google has sent out there about good and bad backlinks is coming home to roost. However it seems that there are still content managers out there that dont seem to get the point.
Backlinks are still important. In fact more important than many would think. It certainly has been caught on that the backlinks can no longer be left as comments on thousands of irrelevant blog posts and that the higher the page rank the better the backlink.
But there is the fly in the ointment. No matter how good the PageRank, if the relevance isnt evident the quality of the backlink is diminished.
I continue to have great difficulty in explaining to some of my clients that publishing an article about storage cabinets on a pickup simply doesnt fit well with a theme around tools to make your business perform better. While any article can be manipulated to direct an outgoing link to anywhere, the complexities of Googles algorithms are grossly misunderstood.
Relevance is now king. The type of article mentioned above would do a lot more in maximising SEO if it is published on a well ranked auto blog, or in an online auto magazine. Since Google no longer publishes PageRank we have to use tools such as Alexa to establish whether the source pages are valuable enough to publish from.
When the published articles are crawled the algorithms are also able to establish whether the context and keywords are relevant to the site they appear on as a whole, and not simply within a dark corner of a particular publishing category.
This is where writing skills come to the fore. When faced with an unusual product or topic creating those quality backlinks are very important, but posting from a very high quality food site is not going to make an article about cannabis do better than the competition and where these sites are well edited the articles may well be rejected because there is always a risk that the article although very well written and meeting all the other high qulaity requirements, simply defy the relevance requirement.
A few well placed exceptionally relevant links from quality content on pages that enjoy high traffic volumes are more likely to increase your SEO than a multitude of articles on the same value page that are completely irrelevant. After all it will eventually begin to look like spamming practice and we all know about the sweat and pain thats in involved in disavowing backlinks and cleaning up your relationship with Google.
So whats the advice?
Build strong long term relationships with the editors of really good online publications in multiple niches and submit relevant articles and frequently. The editors will love you for unique and engaging articles that done hurt their SEO and your clients will love you for the real boost that their site enjoys.
If you are looking for effective consultancy surrounding your digital strategy why not contact the author on the contact page by clicking here.
The instructions that we receive however can be quite eye watering. It is clear that the message that Google has sent out there about good and bad backlinks is coming home to roost. However it seems that there are still content managers out there that dont seem to get the point.
Backlinks are still important. In fact more important than many would think. It certainly has been caught on that the backlinks can no longer be left as comments on thousands of irrelevant blog posts and that the higher the page rank the better the backlink.
But there is the fly in the ointment. No matter how good the PageRank, if the relevance isnt evident the quality of the backlink is diminished.
I continue to have great difficulty in explaining to some of my clients that publishing an article about storage cabinets on a pickup simply doesnt fit well with a theme around tools to make your business perform better. While any article can be manipulated to direct an outgoing link to anywhere, the complexities of Googles algorithms are grossly misunderstood.
Relevance is now king. The type of article mentioned above would do a lot more in maximising SEO if it is published on a well ranked auto blog, or in an online auto magazine. Since Google no longer publishes PageRank we have to use tools such as Alexa to establish whether the source pages are valuable enough to publish from.
When the published articles are crawled the algorithms are also able to establish whether the context and keywords are relevant to the site they appear on as a whole, and not simply within a dark corner of a particular publishing category.
This is where writing skills come to the fore. When faced with an unusual product or topic creating those quality backlinks are very important, but posting from a very high quality food site is not going to make an article about cannabis do better than the competition and where these sites are well edited the articles may well be rejected because there is always a risk that the article although very well written and meeting all the other high qulaity requirements, simply defy the relevance requirement.
A few well placed exceptionally relevant links from quality content on pages that enjoy high traffic volumes are more likely to increase your SEO than a multitude of articles on the same value page that are completely irrelevant. After all it will eventually begin to look like spamming practice and we all know about the sweat and pain thats in involved in disavowing backlinks and cleaning up your relationship with Google.
So whats the advice?
Build strong long term relationships with the editors of really good online publications in multiple niches and submit relevant articles and frequently. The editors will love you for unique and engaging articles that done hurt their SEO and your clients will love you for the real boost that their site enjoys.
If you are looking for effective consultancy surrounding your digital strategy why not contact the author on the contact page by clicking here.
