The digital marketing game is forever changing though one thing will always stay the same: the necessity for producing top quality content that is rich with detail and relevance to your industry as part of a content marketing strategy. Tweaks and tricks will most certainly come and go, though the supply and demand for quality writing will always be there.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HIGH QUALITY CONTENT IN RELATION TO SEO AND DIGITAL MARKETING.

The trouble is that there are far too many people out there that are trying to bend the rules and cut corners and like it or not: Google is becoming incredibly well versed in separating the wheat from the chaff, especially when it comes to the content produced in order to boost search rankings.

Of course one of the most common practices and indeed, biggest mistakes made is for people to simply copy and paste content from one website and try to pass it off as their own (Scraping) While this seems like a great idea; Google are masters at picking up on duplicate content. Not only will this not work at all for you, but it can also be detrimental to your progression and could well lead to some form of penalisation. It is black-hat, it is lazy and it is ineffective.

Another rather common practice is to produce ‘thin content’. Thin content, in a nut shell is an article or a piece of writing that is packed full of keywords that are relevant to the industry and search phrase, though has very little if no information at all within the text. It is a very lazy technique that involves spilling a load of drivel onto a page with the sole purpose of improving ones rankings without actually providing anything of value to the reader.

This is something that Google has cracked down on an awful lot since the Panda update. While there are trillions of pages in Googles index and that it would be impossible to check through by hand, there are some impressive techniques that the Search Giant utilises to stay on top of these black-hat techniques.

For example there is one particular technique that Google uses to algorithmically judge the value of a website’s content: ‘time to long click’. Basically this measures the time between user clicking on search result and staying on the page before returning once again to the original search page.

As I am sure you can imagine if a user logs onto a website and leaves within a minute, the content was irrelevant and useless. Whereas if a user logs onto a website and stays there then they must have found a rather useful source of information…that or they had to rush off to the toilet or answer the door. The system is not entirely fool proof of course, though for the most part Google are very effective at keeping on top of this so do yourselves a favour and save the trouble; invest in rich, relevant and informative content for your website.