Why Original Quality Content is Crucial for Good SEO
Having good quality and original content on your site has many benefits, not just for your visitors. However, making sure that your website is unique is just as beneficial when it comes to your ranking in the search engines.
Most websites have thousands of words scattered across a handful of pages. So it goes to reason that the more words you have per page, the higher your chances are of earning a higher ranking on the search engines. With the amount demand placed on content today, you might be tempted to cut corners.
Maybe you're selling a couple of products similar to other vendors and you decide to use the same description for your items. They might have had an excellent description and you just couldn't help yourself. Either way, doing so will do very little for your credibility when it comes to your visitor and the search engines.
Plagiarism is an act that is really frowned upon by the online community. Webmasters aren't too fond of others who copy their content and the search engines don't take kindly to it either. When their crawlers search for new pages, each page found is indexes individually. This way, they have a log of all the pages they've ever crawled which in turn allows them to filter out portions of the web that they've crawled previously.
Then the search engines algorithms kick in and sift out content of the highest quality and relevancy for sorting by ranking on search results. When the search engines find duplicate content, they punish the site with the duplicate by giving it a lower ranking on the search results then that of the site with the original optimized copy.
This is why it's important to ensure your content is not being borrowed or that you don't plagiarize on your site. The whole point of SEO is to achieve regular indexing of your pages so that you achieve a higher ranking. If you're just highlighting your own copied content, you'll end up doing your site more harm than good.
On the other hand, keeping the needs of your visitors in mind is also important. If they've previously visited a different page or site within your site, and read the duplicate content, the chances of them being impressed aren't going to be all to high. The content on your site is your main means of communicating your business with your visitors. Cutting corners will just cut your opportunity of adding your own personal touch to your site so that your readers are hearing what they want to hear.
Duplicate content will always result in a lose-lose situation in any occasion on any website. In addition it will undermine all of your SEO efforts as well as give your visitors another reason to not trust your site as original. This is important because the key to marketing yourself online is all about building confidence in your audience with the limited amount of time you have; ruining this aspect of your marketing is as simple as copying content from others, and along with that loss, you also loose the trust of your visitors which is a lost cause when it comes to re-earning it.
When it comes to SEO, your strongest weapon is using your own original content. Having original good quality content will aid you in building your links and other marketing activities. Don't fall prey to the temptation of plagiarizing a fellow webmaster and start with an empty canvas where you can write all of your fresh ideas and your site will begin to reap the benefits.
Posted in Internet Marketing
