Google rained a parade of algorithm changes on its search engine last year, all aimed at improving the results by devaluing content mills and link farms. This shook up search engine optimization (SEO) for many who found old tactics no longer worked. Fortunately, you can still win at SEO with articles and blog posts, especially guest blog posts placed on authority sites.
SEO with Articles and Blog Posts
Content rules the search engines. Articles and blog posts are the content that contain your keywords in context and can attract interest in the search engines. Obviously, the more content you have on your site, the more likely you have the exact content a searcher seeks.
Beyond detecting keywords, search engine spiders cannot understand the words in your content. This is why the search engines got in trouble in the past. Low-quality sites were able to improve their SEO with articles and blog posts stuffed with keywords but of very little value for human readers.
SEO Spun Out of Control
At one point, the situation was so out of hand that some webmasters were spinning the same nonsense into new configurations over and over and reaping the rewards of first page listings. At last, Google took drastic measures to correct the problem.
Going forward, Google and the other search engines are looking for cues from readers and other websites to determine whether the content on a website offers useful information for searchers. Inbound links from authority websites will prove the value of a site and increase its visibility in the search engines, while low quality connections may draw penalties.
SEO with Guest Blog Posts
One of the best ways to get inbound links from authority sites in your niche is to place your quality content on those sites. Writing guest posts for other bloggers gets you high quality links from respected sites, while also building your visibility with your target market.
SEO with Articles on Directories
The changes on Google have forced webmasters to be much choosier about the directories on which they place their articles. Inbound links from sites which have a tarnished reputation in Google’s search can hurt your site’s reputation as well.
However, if you place your content on sites that supervise the quality of their articles, then you can improve your SEO with articles that link back to your website in the resource box. Some of these directories allow republishing as long as the resource box is intact. This can greatly increase the diversity of inbound links your site receives, another important cue for Google and the other search engines.
Some websites have been doing the right thing all along by placing quality content on their sites and others. These sites will continue to rank well in the search engines regardless of future changes because they understood all along the importance of improving SEO with articles and blog posts.
