Article Submission Review

What is Quality Content in Today’s SEO?

0

The more things change, the more things stay the same – I’m sure you’ve heard that before, but it really applies a lot to the fundamentals of SEO. At the heart of SEO is good quality content and the need for that has not changed one bit since day one of the Internet. The fact is that Google thrives on high quality content. The Panda likes its bamboo… so feed it plenty and keep it happy.

The first rule of creating quality content is to never publish anything that is not quality or original content on your site – just don’t do it. Don’t try to mix in some lower quality stuff to get your number of articles on your site up or anything like that. Putting non-unique content on your site is not wise in today’s post-Panda era of SEO.

You’ve probably also heard the phrase “life rewards those that take action” and this applies to content and SEO as well. You see, you need a lot of good quality content and you need to post it frequently. The frequency part is important because you are training the Panda to come find its bamboo – know what I mean? You want Google to see your site as a quality provider of content and to train Google to keep coming back. The way you do that is to consistently feed it the quality content it wants.

When it comes to producing quality content you have to think not only about the frequency of publication but also the size of the content. To really determine what you need, you have to look within your niche. If you’re adding blog content things are different than if you’re adding content to your e-commerce descriptions, for example. However, one fact always remains – more is better, as long as the quality is high.

Why do you want to strive to make Google happy with quality content? Well, rankings are part of it, but site authority is also very, very important. See our other blog post entitled What is An Authority Site for more in-depth coverage on the topic.

Whether examining you’re your backlinks, ability to rank for a given keyword or content you need to be looking at your competition and one-upping them. The way to do that is look at the top 10 sites for the specific keyword you’re targeting and record how much content they have on their ranking pages. Then design your content to be at least 20% more than that, though we recommend going much more and actually doubling their content.

Another tactic with content that works very well today is to create very large topical landing pages of 1500 or 2000 or even 3000 words long. You pick a main keyword that you are targeting and put it in the URL and title of the post. Then you select a bunch of sub-phrase keywords that are long tail variations of your primary keyword and use them within sub-headings that you make <h2> tags. Then you fill them in with about 200 to 250 words per sub-section. This creates a very large keyword magnet of content for your site and can be very effective, but don’t forget to linkbuild to it.

Regarding Keyword Density – don’t worry too much about it, just go conservative. In the past it was a strategy to design around keyword density but we highly advise against that today. You have to be very careful not to keyword stuff your content and so from a keyword density standpoint we recommend you keep to around 1%. What this means is that for every 100 words of content you write you use your keyword only once. A five hundred word article would use the keyword five times, for example. Pretty easy stuff.

For general purpose SEO content writing here are some brief but effective guidelines. The fact is you don’t need to make this complicated.

• Use the primary keyword in your Title
• Use the primary keyword in the URL
• Use the primary keyword in the first paragraph, ideally in the first couple of sentences
• Use the primary keyword a total one time for every 100 keywords in the article
• Mix in two or three other keywords into the article, but don’t force it – just write naturally
• Use the primary keyword once in the closing paragraph of the article
• Create a couple links in the content to other pages on your site that you are building links to
• Write naturally and do not keyword stuff
• Mix up the size of your articles – so some small ones (250 words), some medium ones (500 words), and some large articles (700-1000+ words)
• Write naturally and do not keyword stuff – yes I know I’m repeating that

There you have it, a quick and concise guide to follow to provide quality content for your website. Remember, however, that content alone will not get you rankings. You need to provide links to your pages. Long gone are the days when you could simply write good content and get high rankings – hasn’t been that way for years – so don’t forget the SEO.

 

• Share

Tags: creating quality content, creating seo content, guide to seo content, seo content guide