When we talk about content in the context of your search engine optimization strategy, we’re actually talking about multiple types of content. Today we’d like to look at four types and how they can help (and harm) your SEO efforts.
The first type is good old fashioned plagiarism. This is when you appropriate someone else’s content as yours. Beyond being unethical, it’s also SEO suicide: Google harshly punishes this technique.
The second type is publishing other content with the proper citations. News blogs do this all the time. “Check out this recent piece in the New Yorker,” they’ll say, and include a word-for-word excerpt. As long as the material is attributed, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this practice. In fact, many people go to news aggregation sites for this very purpose.
A third type is excerpting published comment and adding unique commentary. This is where you can show your blog to be an authoritative source on a given topic. And the last type, of course, is 100% original content.
In order to maximize SEO, your blog should be a combination of the latter three types with a high concentration on original content. We can help.
