What do we mean by quality content? - Google Optimization Series Part 2

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Content is one of the most over-rated and over-used words on the internet. Everyone agrees that content is King, but sometimes the discussion isn’t too clear on just what constitutes good content. “Quality content”, in fact, is almost completely subjective. It requires a human editor to make a qualitative judgment in order to label a content page “high quality” or not. As we all know, humans don’t make the call, but search engine algos guess at the page’s relative merit.

So the key for our discussion is to concern ourselves with how machines can predict the quality of content. One way to do so is to judge the words on the page. The words will be counted, and some sort of keyword density can be estimated. On-page analysis will be a part of how your content is judged, but it’s generally a small part. For good basic Google optimization, the following components, I’ve found, result in good rankings:

• Well written title with keywords prominent
• H1 with keywords prominent
• Mentioning the keywords somewhere in the text, and mentioning synonyms, as well

You don’t need to overdo any of it. Write natural, but keep some regard for your keywords. If your keywords are Las Vegas Vacation, a title like “Las Vegas Vacation secrets revealed” would be a good title because the keywords are at the beginning, and the title is also good copy, which would result in getting high clicks when displayed in the SERPS. Don’t forget, half the battle in getting people to your website is for them to click on the SERPS. Better titles will ensure you get more traffic than your competition.

The second part of the equation of how traffic is calculated is by the links to the article. If the links 1) come from similar high rated sites and 2) contain the exact target anchor text, you’re very likely to do well. If your target is “Lasik Eye Surgery” and your page has a link from the International Association of Lasik Eye Surgery to your page with the anchor text of “Lasik Eye Surgery”, you can expect that Google will take that into account and think of your page in terms of those keywords. Several such links should be enough to help you rank. The content you write defines the anchor text that people link with, so content is King once again.

If your quality is really high quality, as judged by humans, your page will end up attracting completely natural links from webmasters who’ve identified your page as a high quality resource. These people will naturally link with the correct anchor text, and this will make your job ten times easier than someone responsible for SEO of a worthless content website. Write your content for readers, and place only a small emphasis on the practical technical aspects of SEO optimization. That way you’ll end up ranking well anyway, and have tons of human visitors to boot. That’s the goal we’re all shooting for in the end.

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