Is Content Still KING?

You must have seen many blogs have sprang the web. Why? As the content is king. Is it really still the King? Just content can't be king. Search engines algorithms are smarter and it just does not depend on content. Writing new and quality content is passé  for search engines now. There are other major factors as well. It is better not to put all the focus on just content. Doing so your website can be content heavy, but may lose quality audience and conversions.

Currently, we are in a state of content overload – this infographic by DOMOSPHERE provides the amount of content published on the internet every day. YouTube users upload 48 hours of video, Facebook users share 684,478 pieces of content, Instagram users share 3,600 new photos, and Tumblr sees 27,778 new posts published. These are sites many people around the world use on a regular basis, and will continue to use in the future. Not to mention all the other web 2.0 sites that have enabled individuals – as well brands – to become publishers and post content.

Very little of it is relevant and brands are failing to cut through the flood as their content marketing fails to take into account the deeply personal and always changing contexts of each individual.



I would say now, the content which influence works. The content that is being shared works. The content that is being talked about works. Nowadays, people really do not get impressed or buy what the ads say. People are much and easily convinced by what their friends and relatives say and recommend. All medias are full of ads and seldom anyone takes it seriously. Influence by friends really works for conversions. And, the search engines do look at such shared and popular content over the web.

The next question will be we can write good content that can influence. But, how to spread that content. You need to engage with like minded people over the web who have synergy is what you write and will be interested in the content. Thus, one needs to build his or her network so that the content what is produced on regular basis is influenced, engaged and is shared among the community. One needs to gain the trust, name and fame among the community and this can only be built with quality content and it consumes time to gain the loyalty of the community.

So, the bottom line is the content what you produce needs to influence and garner attention of as many people as possible. This is only possible when you have a good network and customer relationship.

E-commerce based websites can use the demographic profile (like age, gender, location...) available of their audience or their prospects to garner more attention to the content. idio Inc provides Content Analytics. Content analytics is the process of structuring previously unstructured content, by extracting new information.  It is the process of measuring content.  The output – the measurements – is in the form of metadata that describes that content. This can include the topics, people, places, companies and concepts in the content, sentiment towards aspects of the content, and the language of that content. Content analytics helps to understand the customers' interests, use social media, identify trends among the customer base, re-use effective content and market content effectively.

Thus, building network and customer relationships helps not only to rank better in search engines but also, increasing the sales.

Duplicate Content Issues and Probable Solutions

Photo credit: http://www.personalbaby.com/

I am sure many of the webmasters have this duplicate content issue and the Big G still does not has a clear-cut solution of solving this issue. Mat Cutts in his blog/videos did address this issue but, I do not think it completely solves the issue of giving the ranking credit to the actual owner of the article. How does Google know who the actual owner is?

Knowingly or unknowingly over the web duplicate content is developed and the SERPs are hijacked. So, let us know what leads to or is considered as duplicate content by Google or any other search engine.

1. Treating mywebsite.com and www.mywebsite.com as different website. The simple solution for this is to use 301 re-direct for mywebsite.com to www.mywebsite.com.


2. You want to have specific regional websites catering to different geographical areas. You have business.com and you also want to have business.co.uk, business.ca and so on. And you use the same content on all these domains. Matt Cutts says, it is not a big concern and webmasters need not worry about it. Do you have the answer for this?


3. Issues with subdomains having the same content as the main domain. If at all you want to use subdomains then, it is better to use 301 re-directs.


4. Dealers or affiliates taking the content from the website of main seller or the manufacturer to market and promote the products. These are honest people who want to sell the products and are caught as dupes as they usually copy the product description from the main website and have it on their own website. Sometimes the SERPs are also hijacked in such cases. If you want to get traffic from the search engines then, use your own content. Google always and will love “original” content.


5. If you have an affiliate program then the program usually generate affiliate links similar to www.yourwebsite.com?affid=007. Search engine will consider this as a separate page to www.yourwebsite.com. Your affiliates will use the affid parameter links, so that they get the credit of sales/clicks their website generates. The only way to avoid this is ask your affiliates to use rel=”nofollow”. But, this can be a dumb idea of losing the link credit. But, this affiliate link can hijack your main site rankings.


6. If your site is getting few pages dynamically with duplicate content like
   http://www.example.com/products.php?trackid=123
   http://www.example.com/products.php?reportid=123
   http://www.example.com/products.php?sessionid=123
   http://www.example.com/products.php?favouriteid=123
   http://www.example.com/products.php?print=yes&trackid=123
   Specifying a link tag in the section of your page content (as seen below) will indicate to the search engine robot that the URL is present and that it should be represented as the preferred canonical URL designated as: link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/products.php” using proper html open and close tags. Please note that the tag will be treated similarly to the 301 re-direct.

Please note that this is just tip of the ice berg and still there are more such innocent duplicate content issues which are difficult to identify and resolve. So, always be careful you do not make such mistakes.

Guidelines for content writing to improve ranking in search engines

This is only for front-end content writing...

Keyword Relevancy: The more relevant the content is to a specific search term, the more likely the page will rank at the top of search results for that search query. Each page need to be targeted to a keyword / key phrase rather than all the pages for all the keywords.

Keyword Density: There is an optimal ratio of key terms to the overall amount of text that must be used for search engine optimization purposes. Keyword Density refers to the overall density of a given keyword for a particular page and is extremely, extremely important for SEO strategy.

Header Tags: This is a combination of the words found in the title, the headings on the web page and the body of the text. Each page need to have the keyword in the header tag and title tag.

Keyword Prominence: Let the header tag and/or the first word of the first line start with the keywords. Also, have the keyword in the every first line of each paragraph (the keyword needs to be in first 90 characters). The same goes for closing the content - have the keyword phrase twice in the closing paragraph as well as in the last 90 characters.

Anchor Text / Links: Link the key phrases to the appropriate pages. Even here - do not try to link all the main keywords to all the pages. Identify a key phrase for each page and link it. Treat every web page as a different website.