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Now the we have covered much of the necessary information regarding access to your website in order to control many of the main elements of your search engine optimization (SEO) destiny, let us look at another facet that you will want to have under your control; Content.
For business owners that are new to internet marketing and SEO; and, even those with years of experience, the subject of content control is a matter of importance and understanding. What is ‘content’? Content, in short order, is the stuff on your site’s webpages. Words, products, images, videos, calls to action items, etc… For the purpose of this post, content will only be considered as the words on the page. The other content items will be covered in upcoming posts. Oh, and did I mention the social sphere content control? More on that in the future.
So…the words on the page. Do you really have control over this? Do you have any of the following on your website?
Forums
Postings by others
Blogs by others
Property listings by others
Inventory listings by others
Job listings by others
Company listings by others
Product listing by others
Comment sections
If you have any one of the above, you will need to be dilligent and monitor each and every post made by others to in order to have control over your SEO future.
Many websites struggle to overcome an over-zealous, well intentioned blogger that is paid or not paid to blog away. Creating content that may overcome the best SEO implementation. Too much content without keyword relevance. Creating copy without links or worse yet, with harmful links. I have personal experience with one powerhouse website that had blog entries with internal and outbound links on irrelevant terms, posted by a paid outside source. Trying to rank for ‘enjoy Christmas’ on a real estate website is probably going to be problematic in any search engine, let alone the damage this type of anchor text shennanigans is going to cause for your primary keywords.
This same type of well intentioned kamikazee attacks to your SEO efforts can be found in the above mentioned forums, content posting, property listings, company listings, etc… Not to mention, duplicate content entries which can contribute to duplicate metadata, page titles in the head area…oops. There I go, down another rabbit hole. For a future post, then.
So, if you intend to succeed with SEO, take control of your content. Educate your contributors and moderate their posts. No sense in shooting yourself in the foot by working against your SEO. Take control of your content.
Written By: Mark Gray – SEO
