The Internet is used by billions of people every day to find and purchase the goods and services they need and desire. As such, the market has become saturated, and it has become crucial that website owners do all they can to stand above the crowd and attract attention.

Search engines play a big part in website owners’ endeavours to rise above the competition. When Google, which is the world’s most popular search engine, changes the way in which it judges the usefulness of websites, business owners and SEO consultants must respond accordingly. Google’s Penguin update in 2012, for example, was an attempt to restrict the effectiveness of black hat SEO in favour of good quality content.

Search engines look to provide users with results that satisfy. This means that instead of looking to please search engines, businesses and website owners should focus their efforts on being useful for those who use their sites. Google’s webmaster guidelines make it easy for site owners, explaining they should:

“make pages primarily for users, not for search engines” and “create a useful, information-rich website, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content”

While SEO has become an integral part in the marketing strategies of many businesses, a number still choose to ignore the importance of engaging content. SEO techniques will push a site to the top of the pile on search sites such as Google and Yahoo! but a site must make use of high quality content in order to be useful and successful in the long term.

Content shouldn’t necessarily be seen as an alternative to other SEO techniques, it should work alongside them. SEO techniques are useful to put a site into the public eye, but from there it’s crucial to make sure it provides for the newfound users.

This can be achieved in a number of ways. Keeping blogs, for example, is a great way of ensuring a site is kept up-to-date. If a user sees that a site hasn’t been updated for some time, they’re unlikely to go further with any interest they may have had.

Graeme Parton

Graeme has experience creating content for online sources and for the radio, and at university he studied Multimedia Journalism.