It’s the goal of every firm out there – to secure a coveted top position in the search engine rankings. But with so much content out there vying for a piece of your audience’s attention, how do you make that happen?

It all starts with the creation of unique content. However, a lot of marketers forget that unique content must also incorporate unique value. For instance, an article taken from another source which is simply rephrased with different words could technically be considered an original piece. But if there is no new information presented, the content isn’t providing readers with any sort of unique value.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t take a You Tube video or certain section of information from an online newspaper or encyclopedia to be brought in and captioned in your piece. Including small segments from other sources does not constitute duplicate content and will not be treated as such by the governing algorithms, so long as the new piece does contain unique content and substance of its own.

According to a video blog featured at SEO MOZ, contrary to popular belief, there’s no magic mix of duplicate and unique content that will fool algorithms. In fact, algorithms are more sophisticated than ever these days, and just because the new content is 51 (a majority) percent unique doesn’t mean it will fool the search engines. Any talk of a magic mix is myth.

In an effort to reward high quality sites, Google introduced Panda in 2011. Panda helped promote the ranking of news and social media sites while lowering the return on sites heavy in advertising. Google has even put its guidelines for high marks out there for the world to see – there’s no secret formula per se – just keep the focus on high quality, unique content and the rest will fall into place.

Duplicate or poor quality content featured in one section of your site can actually damage the overall ranking of the entire site. To learn more about how quality copywriting can help your business earn a top spot in the ranks, call or click today.