You’ll hear it over
and over again. Content is king, when it comes to aiming for success with
search engines. Indeed, that’s why the Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking
Factors begins with the
content “elements,” with the very first element being about content quality.
Get your content right, and you’ve created a solid foundation to support all
your other SEO efforts.
Content Quality
More than anything else,
are you producing quality content? If you’re selling something, do you go
beyond being only a brochure with the same information that can be found on
hundreds of other sites?
Do you provide a
reason for people to spend more than a few seconds reading your pages?
Do you offer real
value, something of substance to visitors, anything unique, different, useful
and that they won’t find elsewhere?
These are just some of
the questions to ask yourself in assessing whether you’re providing quality
content. Do provide it, because it is literally the cornerstone upon which
other factors depend.
Below, some articles
on the topic of content quality from Search Engine Land, to get you thinking in
the right direction
Content Research / Keyword
Research
Perhaps the most important
SEO tactic after creating good content is good keyword research. There are a
variety of tools that allow you to easily, and for free, discover the ways that
people may be searching for your content.
You want to create content using those keywords, the search
terms people are using. That effectively lets your content “answer” them.
For example, a page about “Avoiding Melanoma” may be using
technical jargon to describe ways to prevent the most dangerous type of skin
cancer. If people are searching for “skin cancer prevention tips,” then writing
in the wrong “language” might cause search engines to skip your content as a
possible answer.
Create content that speaks to what people are searching for,
that uses the language that they themselves are using.
Content Words / Use Of
Keywords
Having done your keyword research (you did that, right?), have
you actually used those words in your content? Or if you’ve already created
some quality content before doing research, perhaps it’s time to revisit that
material and do some editing.
Bottom line: if you want your pages to be found for particular
words, it’s a good idea to actually use those words in your copy.
How often? Repeat each word you want to be found for at least
five times or seek out a keyword density of 2.45%, for best results.
OK, that was a joke. There’s no precise number of times, and
even if “keyword density” sounds scientific, honest, even if you hit some
promised “ideal” percentage, that would guarantee nothing.
Just use common sense. Think about the words you want a page to
be found for, the words you especially feel are relevant from your keyword
research. Then use them naturally on the page. If you commonly shift to
pronouns on a second and further references, maybe use the actual noun again
here and there, rather than a pronoun.
Content Engagement
If you’ve written quality content, then users will be engaging
with it. To determine that, search engines may try to measure engagement in a
variety of ways.
For example, did someone search, find your page in the listings,
clickthrough but then immediately “bounce” back to the results to try something
else? That can be a sign that your content isn’t engaging. It’s also a metric
search engines can measure.
Are people sending a relatively long time reviewing your
content, in relation to similar content on other sites? That “time on site”
metric is another thing that search engines can measure, such as through
toolbars that both Google and Bing offer.
Social “likes” of the Facebook type and other varieties are
another way that engagement might be measured, and we’ll cover these more in
the Social section of this guide.
Search engines are typically cagey about if they use engagement
metrics much, much less exactly what metrics they may use. But we do think it
is a factor being measured in several ways. Success here is highly linked to
the quality of your content.
Content Freshness
No, you can’t just
update your pages every day thinking that will make them “fresh” and thus more
likely to rank better with search engines. Nor can you just add new pages on
anything constantly and think that gives you a freshness boost, either.
However, Google does have
something it calls “Query Deserved Freshness.” This means that if
there’s a search that’s suddenly getting unusually popular versus its normal
activity for some reason, Google will look to see if there’s any fresh content
on that topic and give it a boost toward the top results.
If you’ve got the right content, on the right topic when QDF
hits, you may enjoy being in the top results for a week or two or three. Just
be aware that after that, your page might disappear. It’s not that you’ve done
anything wrong. It’s just that the freshness boost has worn off.
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