Current trending themes in the internet marketing world include ‘content marketing’. Searches reveal comments that ‘SEO is dead, Content Marketing is the new SEO’. But most, if not all of this is simply hype.
Good SEO has always been about good content. This is nothing new. Well written webpages containing good content have always done better in SEO and have always remained resistant to changes in SEO algorithms.
Its true there have been a few SEO tricks that lasted a short time – things like reciprocal links, and if you go back far enough using keywords in meta data. But agencies using these as the backbone of their SEO strategy have been left explaining various Google algorithm updates to clients when websites disappear from search results.
One of the key facets of the Google algorithm has always been good content. But also good linked content – and seeing the image of an early webpage in hypertext ’91 (the forefunner to HTML) highlights the origins of the text based search. The Google search algorithm started early on in the web’s history and it was based on just such content. Text marked up and linked together with hypertext links. I remember linking documents from one research team to another using this across a unix network in a research lab. It was interesting seeing how projects in different areas linked together via common theories or environments. This is how Google’s algorithm works – it is looking at how content links together across the web.
So content marketing is not new – it is old. It was there at the birth of the world wide web. The recent buzz about content marketing is a new fad, merely a new name for something that should have been happening for a long time.
But going back to the origins of the web – linking up research texts across different labs can help understand the aim behind the Google algorithm – it is to find new information, and link related information together. It is a research tool looking for new ideas and not copy cat pages. So forget over engineered SEO plans that make all websites look the same. Be different – produce unique content that Google will like, and you have effective SEO
In fact SEO has not changed at all in ten plus years – it was always about ensuring well marked up and clearly labelled content is easily trawled by Google robots. Nothing had changed. Except the buzz words used.
Article by Rachel Cornish
