Last week I was lucky enough to attend the Brighton SEO conference. Throughout the day there were many different talks and discussions from people working in in SEO across a number of sectors, and while their areas of expertise differed, there was one topic that was covered in almost every session – content.
It has long been said that ‘content is king’ and that is truer now than ever before following recent updates to the Google algorithm. I could spend a long time discussing these changes and I think that is best left for another post, so in the meantime, if you would like to read more about the latest changes, I recommend this post by Branded3.
The conference opened with a panel discussion featuring, amongst others, Dave Coplin of Bing and Pierre Far from Google. Dave admitted that Bing uses social media as a ranking factor and while Pierre wouldn’t say that the number of followers, messages and interactions affects your ranking on Google, many of his comments suggested that it does. Both agreed that having good quality content on your website is important. If content is of a high quality and useful, then users will want to share it, and so this will attract more visitors to your site. The number of times your content is shared is considered more important than the number of followers that you have channels such as Twitter or Facebook.
One of the other panel members also reinforced that the content that you write in a tweet can affect the ranking of a page if it contains a link to it. One page on his website started to rank for a term that was not mentioned anywhere on his site but had been used in a tweet that he had sent out.
Content on your site is not necessarily text, it can be images, video, audio, data, etc. In fact, people are more likely to share things that are easy to digest, whether this is an infographic or a short video.
Consistently producing good quality content for your website allows Google to build up a level of trust with your site. If you are using the rel=author mark up, Google can associate your content on any website that you may write on. This can be particularly beneficial if you make use of guest bloggers.
There were a number of other interesting topics that were covered throughout the day and I will post about these in due course, but the most important tip of the day was what we already knew – content is king.
A great poster was produced by Shelli Walsh to summarise the day:
