Getting users to your website is a fairly complex issue. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the most heavily researched, contested and coveted marketing disciplines because search is still where it’s at for attracting engaged users to your website.
Yet, search engines don’t offer us marketers a how-to guide on how to rank well in their engines. That’s why it is essential to glean your knowledge of SEO best practices from plenty of trusted blogs, forums and articles online as well as from consultants and employees who have experience and success in page one search rankings.
A recent SEOmoz post by Rand Fishkin disclosed an interesting forum thread between himself and eight other SEO sages on the subject of whether great content equals great rankings. Herein, I’ll attempt to sum up the expert’s thoughts on what relevance great content has in organic search rankings.
So, does great content equate into great search rankings? Great content is
important because people generally want to read well-written, engaging content. But just having great content on your site doesn’t mean that you will rank well. Other factors like site architecture and inbound links are major contributors to rankings. Now, if all things are equal (site architecture, inbound link quality/number) and your competitors are content with stale or inaccurate content, your great content will motivate people to link to your site and share your information with others which will in effect, produce better rankings.
As Matt Cutts of Google is known to state: Google strives to provide the most relevant search experience. He repeatedly encourages marketers to produce great content. But for the time, great content isn’t a ranking factor! So while it’s only logical to provide the best content you can for your users, it won’t automatically earn you a top spot.
Google and Bing are always aiming at improving relevancy, so it is possible that over time, the better your content, the more useful your site will be for their searchers and thus, the better quality score you’ll get from those engines as part of the total ranking equation. Social media is one such trend that will likely affect ranking factors in the near-term: real-time tweets and updates may affect a site’s relevancy.
However, as it stands now, it gets down to a less noble conclusion: the content that is marketed the best is the content that ranks the best. Those who have the best quality and sometimes highest number of inbound links generally rank the best.