In this article we will explain the value of quality unique content and SEO. Originally the internet was designed as a free information stream, however over the past decade business’s and marketers have seen the value in generating traffic by supplying information as a product and turned the world wide web into a income producing giant. For example writing an article will generate traffic. Traffic will then sell your products and selling product equals $$$. This system has created a mass manipulation of web content in order to achieve high rankings.

Example: Overloading Keywords
When a person queries a search in a search engine, the spider’s job is to supply the searcher with the highest quality result related to the specific keyword(s). One of the elements a spider looks for is keyword density which basically is how many times does the keyword appear in the websites content. Lets say you are searching for “baseball cards” in the image below you will see a cached wikipedia page highlighting the variations of the words baseball and cards.

One of the reasons this wiki page is on the first page of Google because of its large amount of content related to baseball. Wiki is an online encyclopedia, they are based on information and in turn they have massive amounts of traffic due to content because of their natural keyword density. Basically the more pages about baseball a site has the more times it appears naturally within the content and the density is higher. The key is to be natural, and to produce original content. In the past when search engine spiders were in the infancy, people would try to trick the spiders by writing a 500-word article and overloading it with keywords. (Example: check out our selection of baseball cards and baseballs for baseball fans.”) This ‘keyword spamming’ did work and sometimes still slips past the radar of spiders. However, as spiders are getting smarter and can recognize the overloading of keywords this occurs much less. The end result of spamming is inevitable loss (sometimes permanent) of your rankings, so our advice is to write for the reader not for the spider. Three pages of natural content will push your keyword density up, and the beauty is you will have more pages cached in the engines and more possibilities to rank for, so this is truly a ‘if you write it they will come’ web world we are in.

This article is regarding duplicate content and the impact it has on rankings in search engines. The popular trend of duplicate template sites had a major impact on web template companies in 2002. We like to call it the crash of the canned templates.  There were several industries being dominated by the template approach. Lets use real estate as an example. At the time the majority of websites being produced for that industry were templates, selected primarily for their quick setup and low cos. Every Realtor needed a website and for 200 dollars you were all set with a template. Within a few clicks you could upload the design that you selected out of the 20 available and you could slap your photo, name and email in and you were ready to do business. It all seemed so perfect, you even had 30 pages of information about real estate, buyers guides, sellers guides, everything! It made Realtors seem professional and knowledgeable.

This was great for some time until thousands were sold, all with the same content! Suddenly Realtors were asking ‘how in the world am I going to be different?” As the search engines began to tighten the standards they used for selections, things went form bad to worse. You would see one happy realtor being found on page one and another realtor bummed out and confused because they had the same template but were not to be found for the same keywords. Why? Because they had purchased their template one week after the first realtor. Why were the spiders taking sides? The answer is very simple. For search engines the total data on the Internet is like an encyclopedia.  If you flip through an encyclopedia looking for information on real estate your not going to see 30 pages of all the same info, so why would a search engine which was designed to be an digital encyclopedia do just that. If you cut corners in developing your site you will put your site at risk. Always originate your own content; if you steal it from another site then you will be penalized because the other site had the info published first. We can’t express how important unique content is and how powerful your site can be if you just write quality information. Always be natural with your content, work hard, blog weekly, and you will see traffic and rankings.