Better Pay Attention to Google By Neal Reynolds, President, BankMarketingCenter.com SEO, as you know, now plays a more critical role than ever in the marketing content that you create to engage your customer. And Google, as you also know, plays a critical role in determining how and when that customer engages with it. It’s important, then, to keep an eye on Google and keep abreast of the changes they may be making to how they rank content in user searches. If you’re a content marketer — and you better be — those changes involve algorithms, which have a profound impact on the type of content you distribute and how it is viewed. Today, we’re going to talk briefly about the content trends driven by the late-last-year algorithm changes at Google: the “Helpful Content Update” and the “Spam Update.” For years, and Google would be the first to admit it, their content ranking algorithm was less than perfect and, as a result, fairly forgiving. As a result, when it came to optimizing content such as websites and web-based articles, blogs, white papers, infographics, ebooks, etc., marketing content developers could get away with things. They’ve been able, for instance, to get away with optimization tactics such as keyword stuffing and link farming (a set of web pages created with the sole aim of linking to a target page in an attempt to improve that page's search engine ranking). In short, writing to the search engines instead of the human being. As of this year, however, the ability to get Want Your Content Viewed? 10 THE ARIZONA BANKER
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