What's More Important than SEO For Your Website?

If you are a bit into SEO you will have surely heard about the latest "Panda" update.
Although this update is just one among the 500 tweaks Google makes to his algorithm during the year, a couple of factors have made, in my opinion, this one particularly popular:

1. It filters out plenty of content-scrapped sites. Site with full automatically generated/scrapped content may have noticed a heavy impact or their rankings.
2. This update has a name. A silly as it may sound having a name helps people identify that event and they tend to think that all subsequent ranking changes are due to that particular update (even when is not the case)

If you are worried about the "algo" change and you are thinking about how to adapt to this new situation and how to get your site more SEO'd why don't you step back a bit and think about the real reason your site should be ranking? In other words: Does your website provide enough quality to rank high?

To help you in this taks here you have some guidelines from Google itself:

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking." 

• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Get all the guidelines here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#3

And for a more updated discussion about what is considered quality, I would recommend you this fine post from seo.moz that highlists questions like:

• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?

~
Mike