SEO Blog

Plenty of people have tried, but almost all have failed to get around Google’s pretty strict rules. All search engines hate to be made to look stupid, they dislike even the notion of another individual profiting from breaking their rules. Therefore they work doubly hard to detect such issues and are inclined to punish suitably.

So how might you consider gaming the system?

How about getting a few sites ranking for the same phrase? Clever in principle, horribly transparent in reality.
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I won’t need to tell you how important content is to search engine rankings. As one of the two major factors, alongside links, content gives your site focus and it also provides vital contextualisation.

Whilst having content on every page of a site is ideal, it can become tired and worn over time. This is noticed not only by frequent visitors but by the search engines too. If there is nothing new on a site to index, the search engine spiders won’t visit. If you don’t get the search engine spiders crawling your pages, then what hope for improved rankings?

Of course you don’t want to be chopping and changing your content constantly. This would be impractical and wouldn’t necessarily have the desired result. But the occasional spruce up can always pay dividends.
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There’s sometimes an assumption that Black Hat SEO is dead and buried. The techniques have been ousted by the search engines and rendered useless. However, that doesn’t mean that people don’t keep trying.

Unscrupulous types will use Black Hat SEO to get quick gains. For example, if you have signed up to a dodgy SEO service that promises top Google rankings within a month, they might well deliver. But they will do so by damaging your site.

One technique is to build a link farm inter-connecting hundreds of unsuspecting sites. This will give you hundreds of new links, some of which might be reasonably strong, helping you leap up the rankings. Unfortunately this is against Google’s rules.
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Many of us are inclined to prioritise our work. This is particularly true when we are snowed under with work and don’t have the time or resources to cope. A situation that many website owners find themselves in at one time or another.

So where does everything fit in then? What should be first and what can wait? You’ve got to plan time for designing the architecture of the site as well as the on-site aesthetics. You have to consider marketing your site, perhaps with SEO, PPC, social media or a combination of the three. You also have to fill the pages with content at some point. But which of these is most important? Well, there isn’t one simple answer sadly.

Each component is essential. You can’t have a great design and no architecture to base it one for example. But I’m here to make the case for content.
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