The best SEO? Good content.

Search Engine Land writes about a recent change in the Google Webmaster Help documentation on search engine rankings. 

This is what Google said before:

"In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."

... and this is what they say now: 

"In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share."

... so link building is not as important as writing good content. 

My advice? Focus on your user and the search engine rankings will follow. Do it the other way around (by stuffing your website with keywords and links) and you are likely to have a website that users find less useful and will ultimately lose you business.

You can read the full article here.

Interesting stories from the past week

Yesterday was a day of interesting news stories which I thought worthy of sharing:

Firstly, an article about how businesses can improve their social media engagement.... and where so many seem to be getting it so wrong. It's simple really and can be summed up by the following quote from the article:

"The snag is that customers do not generally just want to interact with marketers. They also want to interact with product designers, customer service, technical support and others who make a difference to their product experience."

The full article can be read here (and it's not a long one).

Secondly, Instagram now includes the ability to shoot videos. 

I tried my first Instagram video on the mornings dog walk (watch it here). Once I realised that you had to hold down the icon for the video to shoot, it worked a treat. It seems to be far more fun to use than my limited experience of its big rival from Twitter, Vine, offers. It has filters and it seems easier to control what you shoot.

Here is a link to a Mashable article on why Instagram video beats Vine...