Tip of the Week: Unique Content

First off, let me introduce myself, I’m Simon, the Internet Marketing Director for HomeQuest Real Estate Software.

I wanted to write a weekly column on this blog to offer helpful tips and advice on how best to use our new IDX Blogger platform to succeed within the major search engines, This weeks tip will cover unique content and its importance.

The most important factor search engines look for whilst ranking sites in their index is fresh, unique text content. There’s an old saying in my industry “content is king” that still holds true.

The search engines (Google specifically) will crawl your website and read all of the text on the pages, each time you add more unique text you are inviting the search engine back to your site for an update and increasing your visibility within them

Unique content is key, if you use duplicate content (content you have cut/paste from another site) you will actually receive a penalty from the search engine, if you wish to show someone else’s content its best to only copy a small snippet, then add a link to the original article to avoid any duplicate content penalties.

The content we have used on our demo sites is a prime example – this content has already been crawled by Google, so Google knows that the demo site is the “owner” of that content. If you were to copy a page and paste it into your own site – you would be penalized by the engine and it would have a negative impact on your listing within Google.

When adding content to your website, remember these tips and avoid any unnecessary penalties and hopefully be successfully within the search engines!

Next weeks Tip: All in one SEO walkthrough.