SEO far SEO good

A few months ago I was discussing SEO strategy with a person who wouldn’t want to be named, but hopefully doesn’t mind being quoted. He asked:

“If we had to choose between creating content or getting links, which would you prioritise?“

SEOs may wince, smile or raise their “good question” eyebrows, but many non-SEOs (aka normal people) might consider this to be a reasonable question.

It’s not, but some historical perspective may help explain why.

In the time before SEO, it was all about content. There wasn’t that much of it around, and it was quite easy to make some noise. Big fish in a small pond.

In hindsight this was the first age of content.

As the quantity of content grew, the search engines needed a way to gauge quality. They chose links.

SEO was born, links became paramount, and the number of incoming links was considered to be indicative of the value of the content.

Google factored this into their algorithm, and an entire industry came into existence. Literally hundreds of thousands of websites that did nothing more than link to hundreds of thousands of other websites.

I remember link sites that pointed to other link sites, and for a brief time, the possibility of the index being bigger than the content started to look plausible.

Others jumped onto the opportunity and soon there were services and applications that would submit your website to many thousands of these utterly pointless sites.

Content is king became distorted into something resembling “if people don’t know, it effectively doesn’t exist”, and there were many, many websites referring to unseen trees falling in forests.

It didn’t take people long to realise that pointless links were pointless, and that it was easier to get real incoming links if the content was actually worth linking to.

Instead of relying on thousands of links from pointless websites that no-one ever visited, people could have links from genuine websites whose visitors might actually be interested in what they were being directed towards.

And so began the second age of online content. Online businesses and other websites started to create good content that pulled targeted visitors in naturally.

And the signals being sent to the search engines were good.

People clicked on relevant links, spent time reading the content and clicked more links because they were interested in what they found.

In a parallel world where intelligence ruled, the obvious means of capitalising on this trend would be to create more content. High quality and lots of it.

In our world, sadly, the obvious means of capitalising on the trend was “if people don’t know, it effectively doesn’t exist”, and there were again many, many websites referring to unseen trees falling in forests.

This time, however, instead of only having links from pointless websites that no-one ever visited, the masses decided to be smarter and also spew their content across as many social media networks as possible.

Yet all too soon this in turn wasn’t enough, and again they needed a means of standing out from the crowd.

“I know – we need more eyeballs, and I know just how to get them.“

“Instead of creating lots of long pointless texts broken up by occasional images, let’s have long pointless images broken up by occasional text.“

Thus began the third age of content – the infographic.

One problem with infographics is that most don’t have a valid reason for existing.

A typical usage pattern is for someone to click the link, look at the infographic for a few seconds, then go back to Twitter, Facebook or whatever black-hole they were engaged in, and most likely retweet or repost it.

In this scenario, the signals being sent to Google are that most people are not interested in this content and website. It’s an interesting strategy (aka: way to go).

I’m personally amazed by the resilience of infographics, but their time will inevitably pass, and they will in turn be replaced by the next big thing: the fourth age of content.

There is, however, an easy to overlook common theme here:

A strategy that has worked in every age of content, irrespective of medium or trend. One that always generated the right signals.

High-quality relevant content.

The rules are simple:

Authentic and quality content results in authentic and quality links.

Authentic links generate relevant traffic.

SEOs and others with too much time on their hands can debate the current and future importance of links ad nauseam, but I am yet to hear any argument against the current or future significance of content.

Quality content has always worked and always will. Creating lots of it is good.