How To Create SEO Friendly Content
SEO is simple: It’s all about Content. The biggest SEO issue that most websites face is lack of quality content. Content is important because it is the way that Google evaluates what your website is about and how good it is. Google is a great reader and it reads, understands and archives the content of each website it crawls. If your content is weak, Google lowers the rank of your website, sometimes ignoring it all together. Google needs to provide great websites for Google users to stay in business and Google sees little value in a website that offers poor content.
Website Content Volume:
Website design trends have been moving toward highly visual sites with minimal content, this can be beautiful, but there is a minimum needed to rank on Google. We test basic SEO factors including content volume and keyword density. These studies show that content volume plays a HUGE factor in rankings, as does keyword density.
Content must teach, explain, inform and answer questions. So you must plan on having plenty of content on every page if you intend to capture search engine rankings. It is good for your users, and it is good for Google.
Include a minimum of 200 words on any web page that you feel has SEO value. More is better, but don’t have so much content that the web page changes focus or gets confusing. 200 words that are highly focused on a single subject or some highly-related subjects are the bare minimum. Ideally, you’ll want 300 – 600 words, but 200 will do.
Website Content Focus:
Each web page must have a narrow focus. It is unrealistic to think that a single web page can capture strong rankings for everything that a business has to offer. A good rule of thumb is to think of the top 10 questions that people ask you and dedicate a page to answering each of these questions.
Don’t underestimate the importance of the Services Pages:
Apart from the home page, the services pages are the most important part of your website. This is what people search for. It is not recommended to build a single web page that offers a punch-list of all services. Each specific service offered by a business should have its own web page. This will allow you to elaborate on each service and explain why you are different and better than your competitors. It will also provide a significant opportunity to capture strong rankings on Google!
Beware Of Duplicate Content:
There are two different types of duplicate content:
1) Content that is the same between pages of the same website and
2) Content that is the same between pages of different websites.
Content duplication between pages within a single website is not so bad and is fairly common within the footer, privacy statements or other disclaimers. But, as a rule-of-thumb, keep internal duplication under 20% of the total content volume.
Content duplication between different websites is a big “RED FLAG” to Google and should be avoided at all costs.
Google will devalue any web page it finds that has plagiarized or copied content from another website and if the level of duplication is excessive, Google will extend the devaluation to the entire website or ban you entirely.
