Content is important. Content is valuable. Content is king.
You can’t hear it anymore – at least if you poke around in the SEO area. But even the many uses of this term do not make it less untrue.Quite the opposite – according to a study on ranking factors (2015) by Searchmetrics GmbH, relevant, audible and holistic content has become even more important. Search engines are increasingly geared to the actual and presumed behavior of users. In 2015, the busy web bees exemplarily designed HTML documents with even more and more understandable content, from which users really benefited in the end.
So it’s fair to say that content finally stole the SEO crown this year. But who sat on the SEO throne in previous years?
2012 and 2013 were the years of social signals. Facebook and Twitter signals correlated tremendously. People were sharing, liking and commenting. Along with onpage techniques, this is now considered a foundation for SEO. In 2014, backlinks held the scepter. Of course, the current trend reversal does not make the other factors completely useless. Backlinks, for example, are still among the most important criteria of search engine optimization. Nevertheless, “backlink spammers” should realize that the quality of links is becoming increasingly important and that the era in which websites could be plastered with irrelevant links in order to achieve a good ranking has long been a thing of the past. The brand factor is a special feature every year, as Google reserves the best places for “well-known brands”. The relevance of this criterion remains quite constant. Content is the only SEO factor that has not taken a beating. How it will fare in the future is hard to predict – but it is unlikely to lose its current relevance.
