With the new Helpful Content guidelines fully rolled out, the impacts and implications of these new algorithm updates are starting to be fully understood by SEOs. For businesses and website owners looking to see success with their websites in the new year, it’s more important than ever to understand what’s important to the Google bots and users accessing websites. Here are some of the main components to SEO success in 2024:
It’s about quality, not quantity.
While having lots and lots of content used to be the goal, it’s now more important to have high-quality content. So if that means producing less content that’s overall higher quality, consider making that switch for your website in the new year. Not only is high quality content important, but low quality content actually can drag down the performance of your website as a whole.Â
Write for people, not search engines.
Unless this is the first article you’ve ever read about SEO, you’ve probably heard this line before. Basically, it just means that your content shouldn’t be awkwardly stuffed with keywords, filled with technical jargon in the hope it will rank for random things, and just generally written like there’s going to be real people reading it at the end of the day. The good news is that this has been a guideline for a long time – so you’ve likely already been doing this! If not, now is a great time to reassess your content and make sure it reads like humans wrote it, and humans want to read it!
Create unique, non-duplicated content.
If you’re utilizing any techniques to create content fast, such as content scraping or AI generation, now would be a great time to make sure there’s no duplication occurring. While these tools can save you some time, there’s no point in using them if they end up getting you penalized for duplicate content in the end. Take the time to make your website content unique and put your own spin on it. Better yet, throw out the cheats entirely and get out those writing tools. You can do it.Â
One good backlink is better than ten toxic backlinks.
What’s in a backlink? While the old school of thinking used to be that any backlink was better than no backlink, more and more importance is being placed on the backlink portfolio of a website as a whole. Looking through your backlinks and disavowing spammy, low-quality links is worth the effort to allow the high-quality links to give your website the backlink power they deserve.Â
Don’t ignore low quality pages on your website.Â
Another important change to make in 2024 is to start monitoring low-quality and low-performing pages on your website. Arguably the biggest change included in the Helpful Content update was the specification that these pages now have the ability to drag down your website as a whole. Careful monitoring and updates should be made to prevent this from happening.Â
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