I had an interesting discussion with someone today from a Web Design Agency about organic SEO – he was of the view that writing content with the express purpose of gaining links to increase a website’s search engine rankings could not really be termed organic. In his opinion all content written to acquire valuable links was bound to be poor quality, re-hashed content that anyone could find on the internet themselves if they bothered to look.
I would agree that until relatively recently poor quality content was produced in abundance just to get a backlink but in the past year or two the emphasis has been shifting to high-quality content that will, by virtue of it’s quality, be reproduced naturally across the internet and organically increase the number of links to a particular website.
My argument was that there was no reason why content written with the main purpose of gaining a link could not also be interesting and engage your potential online visitors. Naturally this was my perspective as a lot of what I do is write good content for SEO purposes, but whilst I recognise that none of what I write would gain a prize for great writing, it is informative and tends to be written to invite comments and provoke discussion. What I have found over the years that I have been writing articles and blogs with the underlying purpose of increasing rankings is that sooner or later people do start to interact with your writing – commenting, criticising and offering further insights.
So my content tends to be the seed from which a wider discussion will follow and the best articles and posts lead to republication of my content on more and more websites and blogs and often opportunities to invite guest content or, even better, lead to offers of guest content by external contributors.
In this way, well-written content does lead to organic growth of the links in the original content by building generating interaction with other online users who spread their opinions about your pieces and naturally promote your content. And if that is not organic growth, I don’t know what is…
Why not let me know your success stories of a simple piece of content that caused a stir?
