In the good old days of print publishing, the publishers that had the best content garnered the most sales. Content had to be attractive, informative and accurate to be able to garner a large audience via newsstands and subscriptions. This formula for success was turned on its head with the advent of Google and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Online publishers were now able to direct visitors to their content by attracting web crawlers. Online marketers and publishers were now filling up their web pages with lots of keywords and links instead of generating useful and quality content. Instead of engaging readers, the focus shifted on engaging web crawlers.
The New SEO
This is all about to change. Google launched its Panda ranking algorithm last year to bring creativity back into online content. This year, Google launched its Penguin ranking algorithm to boost their New SEO efforts. Both these algorithms were designed to lower the ranking of low quality websites and websites that use black-hat SEO techniques to attract web crawlers. This New SEO resulted in the sudden drop in rankings of many famous websites. It now has online marketers and businesses rushing to produce quality content to improve search rankings.
The new Google algorithms have ensured that only content will be able to decide search rankings. All publishers will now be judged only on the content they produce. As a result, many businesses are now hiring the services of content writing companies to ensure that they are publishing quality content in line with the New SEO guidelines. Online publishers now need to show Google that they can generate good content and Google will reward them by increasing the search rankings of their websites.
Publishers Must Now Look Beyond Google
Most marketers and businesses are aware that there are two ways that users can discover online content. The most common way users find content is by typing what they are looking for into search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Another way that users discover content is when it is shared via email or on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. People often stumble upon interesting articles, images, videos, etc. on the internet that they share with their friends on Facebook. This second method is steadily gaining popularity of late.
This means that content marketers and SEO experts must now consider the discovery aspect of online publishing. They must now make sure that their content is being shared by people across various social networks. Funnily enough, SEO experts must now consider content sharing on Facebook to improve website ranks on Google. Content must now be interesting enough so that people will discover it without the help of search engines and share it on Facebook.
This new trend spells good news for most content creators. The focus is back on humans to create quality content. Content can no longer be generated mechanically and stuffed with keywords. This New SEO respects both content creators and the audience.