The beauty of Google’s search algorithm is that it lets you find what you’re looking for, and it gets better all the time. Because Google is one of the most important ways to ‘get found’ on the web, a whole industry has arisen around how to “beat” the Google search algorithm: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

SEO is all about how to get your webpage to the top of the list. The algorithm itself is, of course, a secret – but hundreds of self-proclaimed ‘experts’ believe they can reverse engineer it enough to understand what factors influence a page’s SEO ranking.

What a lot of SEO experts forget to tell you though is that the best way to get a high ranking in Google is to create content that people want. Sure, you can tweak things like the page title and the URL to make sure the right things get noticed first, but if you have content or a site that people don’t want to link to or don’t want to view, than no matter what SEO tricks you pull, you’re not going end up on Page 1 of a Google search result.

Instead of spending 70% of your time working on your SEO, try putting 70% of your effort into your content… because at the end of the day, that is where your traffic is going to come from.