3 Key Reasons You Should Never Sacrifice Quality Content for SEO

February 20, 2012 at 8:06 am | Posted in Digital Marketing, Relevant Content, SEO | 9 Comments
Tags: content optimization, digital marketing, emarketing, internet marketing, marketing, online marketing, quality, relevancy, relevant content, SEO, web content, web marketing, web traffic

There’s no doubting that SEO is a powerful web marketing tool for driving traffic to your website. Because of search engine algorithms, keyword integration has become a must for drawing attention to a single website in the vast sea of sites on the Internet. In some ways, SEO has become a necessary evil; there’s simply no getting around using it to some extent in order to stand out amidst the crowd of competitors. What you don’t want to do as an internet marketer is to sacrifice quality content for the sake of SEO optimization. Here’s why:

1.      Humans Don’t Read SEO

And they don’t want to. With the epidemic of content overload in today’s society, people are sifting through the garbage online to find the good stuff—information that is informative, engaging, and above all, relevant. If your site is so keyword-optimized that it barely passes as English, then you’ve got a problem. People today are busy and easily distracted. Therefore, when they’re looking for information or resources on the web, they want it to be easy to read and understand. If you’re pounding your keyword rather than focusing on providing useful, compelling information, then you’ll lose a conversion, your bounce rate will go up, and your ranking on SERPs will suffer. Ironically, all of your SEO efforts will have backfired because you focused more on keyword optimization than you did on the end user.

2.      Too Much SEO Screams Desperation

Even laypeople have caught on to the fact that online marketers are using SEO to try to get their attention, and when they come across a keyword dense site, they’re likely to feel duped, or at the very least annoyed. As a result, your website will lose credibility, and your visitors will likely bounce never to return again. Why? Because you will have sent the message loud and clear that you care more about climbing to the top of the search engine results pages than you do about the reader/customer.  To illustrate, check out this SEO-optimized birthday card. While it’s good for a chuckle, if you actually received a message like this, would you regard it as genuine, or would you wonder what the messenger was up to?

3.      Quality Content Trumps SEO

It’s true—providing good, relevant, fresh content is the best way to make it to the top of the SERPs. Why? Because assuming you’ve accurately identified your target audience and you’re providing content that is specifically aimed at their unique pains and preferences, then the keywords are already there. Would it hurt to make an effort to increase keyword density just a bit? Absolutely not—in fact, it may help. But, at the end of the day, if your content is genuinely engaging and relevant, then your bounce rate will drop, other sites will link to yours, and your visitors will keep coming back for more. In Google’s “mind,” this will increase your credibility and authority, thus boosting you rankings. Google software engineer Matt Cutts says it best: “Great content has to be the foundation of any good site.”

Want to learn more about how a relevant content optimization service like Relevantor^TM can increase the quality of your site’s content and complement your SEO efforts? Sign up for a personal demo today!

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Efi Rodik

Co-Founder & CEO
Relevantor LLC

www.relevantor.com

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