As the public gets fed up with being flooded with paid ads online, having organic content has never been more important for businesses trying to gain exposure.
With Google’s impending Penguin update around the corner, Search Engine Land reports that Google has also shown that they believe this to be a vital factor in effective search engine marketing. In a recent interview with Stone Temple Consulting, Google’s Gary Illyes discussed how the search engine giant would handle SEO certification. The bottom line: they won’t.
They will still offer certification for AdWords, display ads, AdSense, Analytics, Google Apps, and a large number of other platforms. The driving force behind Google’s decision is that they no longer want to accept money from webmasters in place of organic search results. Illyes implied that it would feel wrong for Google to bypass quality content in order to boost companies who paid them up on search results.
The key to their successful search engine algorithm is the scaling of the organic content. This becomes muddled when mixed with paid ads.
However, according to MarTech Advisor, just creating organic content may not be enough to boost rankings anymore. A recent study by Raven Tools showed that online marketers are now facing a multitude of SEO concerns in the continuously evolving field, such as links with no anchor text, pages with duplicate content, or meta descriptions that were completely absent or may have been the wrong length.
“Google’s Penguin update adds even more complexity to their ranking system. Since Google is still, and will be for the foreseeable future, the #1 search engine, business owners and web designers need to be concerned with these changes and implement plans to mitigate any bad content or links that would hurt rankings,” said Suzanne Jeska, Owner, MRN Web Designs. “This starts by analyzing the onsite anchor links and the offsite backlinks to your site and then working with your designer or SEO specialist to decide which links to disavow. The disavow instructs Google that you don’t want that link followed because it is a low quality link and not relevant to your site. Just be careful! You don’t want to disavow a link that may actually be helping your site, this could hurt you in the rankings. Nothing is straightforward and Google continues to keep the search engine optimization process very challenging.”
When Raven Tools evaluated four billion on-page SEO problems for more than 200 million page visits between February and June of 2015, they found that one of the largest issues with SEO involved images.
“Google image search receives over 1 billion page views every single day. It is safe to say, image search is part of many searchers’ daily Internet activity. The higher your images rank in image search, the more likely people will visit your pages through image search. Despite the opportunity, image optimization is still an untapped resource for many websites today,” the report stated.