Before you publish that blog post or update that website copy, you need to make sure your content is SEO-ready. SEO-ready content will help – and not hurt – your PageRank. Here are the five characteristics of SEO-ready content that yours must have before being published.
Quality
The single most important characteristic of SEO-ready content is quality – high quality. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that keyword density or anything else is the most important thing to pay attention to. A good keyword density helps (more on that later), but quality is what matters most. Not only can Google recognize quality content, but quality content works because other people want to read it. And other people will link to your content on its merit alone – not because you have a good keyword density or anything else for that matter.
Readability
Readability refers to how easy your content is to read based on writing style (not font size or misspellings, for example, although those matter, too). There are actually very complex algorithms that Google uses to evaluate the readability of a page based on different scales and scientific methods (indexes and formulas that were designed way before Google). Reread your content and determine how easy it would be for the general public to understand. Do you use more technical jargon than your target audience might understand without explanation? Is your message coming across clearly?
Keyword Density
While keyword density isn’t most important, it’s something to consider. First of all, don’t write your content with a high keyword density in mind, or it will sound unnatural. Google is on the lookout for keyword stuffing. The best practice is to count your keywords once your content is complete, and find the density by this formula: (number of times keyword is used) / (total number of words) x 100. Most SEO experts recommend a keyword density of 1-3%, although you won’t likely attract the scrutiny of Google if your keyword density is a few points higher.
Originality
If your content isn’t original, all of your SEO efforts are for naught. If you reuse content over and over again on your website, or if you “borrow” someone else’s content, your website may be penalized for duplicate content. If your material isn’t original, Google won’t see why they should suggest your site to searchers over any other site, and copying material doesn’t prove your site’s authenticity. And like quality, originality is what will get people to read and recommend your site.
Good Grammar
If you haven’t carefully edited your content for misspellings and grammatical errors, it isn’t SEO-ready. Google will detect misspellings and grammatical errors. If you have a lot of them, Google will think your site isn’t that good. You want a website without errors, and that includes errors in your writing. Google doesn’t expect you to be perfect, but it will penalize you if your site is riddled with errors. Not only that, but people often have a difficult time reading (or wanting to read) content with errors.
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thanks for sharing wonderful information with us
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This is good, vry nice discription.
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Knowing that Google can apparently check things such as quality of content can lead to be a little bit concerned. I am not against giving quality content. However, I hope that Google algorithm will always be logical. That way, webmasters may not end up with content that does not make sense.
However, I have learnt that this major search engine was using human reviewers. I think that while a lot of things are automated, Google can still be tricked. As long as they have human reviewers, this could be a proof of the fact that this search engine is not perfect.
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The keyword density formula is news to me, I have been using the “3 or 4 times” rule for a long time – but it makes perfect sense, why would a phrase said 3 times matter in a 10,000 word epic? Thank you a lot for this post, it confirmed a lot of things I already knew, and added a few new things to keep in mind.
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I find it very reassuring that page rank is based on quality rather than just keyword content. It encourages writers who are trying to do their best and put their best efforts forward. I absolutely hate blogs that have poor grammar, spelling, formatting, and so on. People will ask me to review their blog, and while I don’t want to hurt their feelings, I don’t want them to publish junk. I’m thankful that I have this article to direct them to when I need back-up, so to speak.
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Content and consistency are the two important characteristics of SEO. Nice tips and thanks for sharing.
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As always, content is king. Too many people spend their time awkwardly forcing a given number of keywords into a certain number of sentences.
What I do is write the blog post first without keywords in mind, because if you have chosen your keywords well then they should naturally crop up in your writing a decent number of times. Using the formula you provided for keyword density after writing the post, you can add or remove the keywords a certain number of times from your post if necessary. This way, the writing is natural and the human content reviewers employed by the major search engines will highly rate your work.
I can’t help but think that if people spent more time following the simple tips you just provided rather than spending their money on all the latest seo courses then they would run far more successful blogs.
Thanks for the read, yet another no-nonsense article on TechWyse!
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Good stuff. There is so much to consider when talking about SEO. This is one of the better articles I have read on the subject. There needs to be a good balance between the technical aspects (keyword density etc,) of SEO and the creative side, actual content of a post. With out those two things, your ranking will suffer.
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The bottom line here is that while your content must have the relevant keywords in a reasonable amounts throughout the article, whatever you write must be relevant to what the viewer is looking for. It should also have enough information to hold their attention and thus get them coming back.
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Quality should always come hand in hand with keyword density. You would not be surprised to see numerous websites, blogs and online articles spam their content with too much keywords. Thus, the reader ends up getting too frustrated in wasting his or her time reading an irrelevant and unsubstantial article.
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Too many people are trying to hold onto the old ideas about the importance of keywords. Quality content really is the most important part of SEO these days. If the articles and content are high quality, the keywords should appear naturally. I am also surprised that sites are still copying content. Recently, I was searching about detoxing and found three separate sites that had the exact same content. All it does is hurt the reputation and popularity of a website.
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Google and Bing use human reviewers to evaluate their search results and the quality of the sites showing up. As the author states, the #1 thing they are looking for is the quality of the content. More specifically, the reviewers are asked to determine if the site appears to be an authoritative source, and if it’s authors appear to be experts in the subject matter or not. They give a lower score to sites with content that is too generic and vague, and lacks any real insight or originality.
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Many of the points mentioned in this article I have them in mind. Anyway, there is one in particular that can mean trouble. Those who don’t have much experience in this vast universe of online publications can’t adapt his style to the algorithms that Google uses to index the sites. That aspect, then, can often influence the style that each person has to write. Isn’t that an obstacle? I think the key is to achieve a balance, but that often means a dynamic of trial and error.