My review/blog is not receiving much traffic, it has very few followers and I just can't rank high enough in Google so I want to produce a lot of great content to help it. Say if you know your niche well should you always target a particular keyword when writing content for your customers? i.e. The typical things that all your competitors are also trying to rank for. My rankings are low for these terms. Or can you basically let the horse go free from the cart and write what you think/know will provide a lot of value to your audience - it could also be incredibly unique but I fear no one will find it if I do it. For example your thoughts on a very recent news article or what you think the future holds for your niche.
Interesting question. I think the latter part of your post is entirely accurate. You can target whatever with a catchy title if you will but you can safely quit thinking you have to stick keywords in the article to rank stuff. I will have to track down the whiteboard friday on this about implicit and explicit search queries but Google is getting a lot better at figuring out what people are actually looking for. This is no longer predicated(entirely at least) on keywords. Write compelling content on the subject matter and don't really sweat stuff like keyword density and things of that nature. hope that helps, Nigel
Thanks Nigel. See I have just recently been thinking really hard about my content strategy and really trying to think of how a website ranks well, why a website ranks well, all the factors involved and the way Google is changing. I just want to be an authority in my niche, I want to provide tonnes of value and get loads of happy returning visitors. I have recently asked myself and searched, is content really King? If I write good content who will find it? My website is small so I have no one to share it. Does this mean Google won't rank anything high just like it has been? It sees me as a nobody right now. How about if I keep writing good content will I get higher rankings? How about if I interact more and network in my niche I will gain a following to share my good content which could in turn gain more customers and links to my pages which Google will like presumably. I now believe that content is half the battle and relationships is the other half. An expert author will not sell many books unless he knows a lot of people, publishing etc. I also now believe "good keyword based content" can be drowned in the sea of other "good keyword based content" to the point where Google can't really separate them and basically randomly orders the top pages. I think its the completely unique freely wrote content that, entertains your visitors, gives them value, makes you stand out from the rest, builds your brand image and grows it. However both types of content are necessary which is why I will focus on them and building relationships.
Although I believe that good content will always be a measuring stick, it's not just about good content anymore. Every possible search query on Google will produce hundreds of thousands of results for that particular query. There's no need for another web page discussing this or that subject, pretty much everything has been beaten half to death. And if something new shows up (in technology, for instance) there are thousands of people ready to jump in and fill that niche. I believe SEO as we know it is dead. It's sad, but true. Doing SEO implies that if you try hard enough you can get great results without spending a penny. I don't think anyone will be able to get great results for free anymore. Maybe average results. Usually pretty crappy ones. Today, if you or me want to get great results, we will have to pay for it. That is becoming a new measuring stick. Don't want to pay? Well, that means you or me have really nothing good to offer.
I agree with quikad here. I could frankly go on about this for a week but a tad busy today. Here is the whiteboard friday I was referring to. http://moz.com/blog/the-future-of-user-behavior-whiteboard-friday I will try to chime back in a bit but I have been saying the same thing for going on 8 years now. "Its googles job to return the most relevant results for X query. In order to rank well you have to make the site actually relevant." To my dismay, this escapes about 99% of seo providers who seem to still think keyword laden articles and throwing links at the problem is somehow a solution. Nigel
Yea I think you are right here. I did SEO as part of my dissertation for my degree. The one thing I learnt from it after the many prior years of SEO I did is that it is dying. Everyone is writing good content or it is all very similar. Google is making the search results different for each person and they are massively cutting down on bad practices. I read on the Google forum somewhere a while ago - they said if you purposely build a backlink on Ezine for example to help improve rankings you are breaking their guidelines and they were actually manually removing them links. However if you did that link to actually want people to just visit your site like a resource then it was ok. It is almost becoming borderline insane. This is the kind of future SEO has. Its dead like you say. So I started my review site/blog with one thing in mind just to write good content. Don't get into any link building or crap like that because Google will ultimately punish me. I have been doing that and it was going well but Google penalised me for some unknown reason and I can't rank for anything now - as you mention there are actually tonnes of reviews/content out there and they all are the same really so does Google just pick them at random? This is where unique content comes in handy. Like you say I think the only way to gain traffic in Google is by paying for it - that is what the next generation of "superstars" is going to be doing and Google will profit big time. I can't afford it so I plan to leech of all the big authority sites(let them spend the money) - steal their traffic via posting etc etc and when the fans see my great unique content they will like it share it etc etc and hopefully I'll be higher up in Google.
Thanks for the link it is an interesting video. Do you think it is best to just build up as big a website as possible with as much relevance as possible to the subject at hand. Forget about the short term rankings and hopefully when the site is at its biggest and therefore most relevant its will gain higher rankings/traffic?
You will be surprised most likely. It may happen faster than you think. Also make sure to glue in all the social signals as well, facebook, twitter, g+ at least. Twitter cards https://yoast.com/twitter-cards-in-action/ and so on. You seem to be on the right track though. Nigel