Google likes good content

15 May Google likes good content

Content is one of the most valuable part of a website. Google evaluates the content, decides the subject matter and then places the site among the most relevant kind of searches. Whereas all other kinds of SEO is merely to direct Google towards the most important parts of the content.

For businesses offering services must write content before actually designing and building the website. Getting your message across to customers or clients has got to be the main purpose of a website, so it wouldn’t make much sense to squash or cut this message just to get the text to fit into a small space. From an SEO perspective the position and the way the content is written is extremely important.

Google has a very clever algorithm that has the ability to understand whether the content written is of a high standard. It is therefore essential to check and double check for any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. You would expect this to be an obvious course of action, however there is actually a high amount of websites containing these kinds of mistakes, and you are unlikely to find any sites with these errors to appear at the top end of any competitive search.

Although keywords are important, it is essential to remember to write for your visitors and not for Google by stuffing incoherent sentences in just to accommodate the keyword phrases – this does not work! Nor does it help to write lists containing keyword phrases, which is a common mistake and could actually lower the Page Rank of a website.

The issue then becomes how to involve these keywords without damaging the value of your content. Although it is necessary to include the keyword phrase you wish to be found for a couple of times, it really doesn’t add much help to add it many more times. Instead try to become more inventive with those keywords using them individually throughout the text maybe in the context of both singular and plural. Google will also look for similar words to help validate that the website is in fact full of quality information, and is the reason why so many search engine optimization experts mention a thesaurus in forums as being the most effective SEO tool.

Where you position the keywords within the content can also help Google find the relevant topic. Google will place a lot more prominence on content found at the beginning of a web page and it is advisable to work a few more keywords and phrases into that area of text. Headings should be used to clearly define each area that the text is covering, with heading 1 (H1) at the start containing your main keyword phrase. A web page should contain no more than one H1, otherwise this may confuse Google.

Bad practices of using content not only include writing lists and keyword stuffing, but also hidden text, which is a black hat technique. This is where secret keyword phrases have been hidden by creating the text the same color as the background. This may have worked years ago, but now Google has developed, it will penalize any website using this method.

Duplicate content is another common mistake made in many websites. There are two ways in which duplicate content can affect websites. One way is for a website to copy the content from a completely different domain. The original domain will not be affected at all, otherwise competitors would be creating duplicate websites just to penalize their competition. However the new domain, will not gain any sort of listing in Google and certainly no Page Rank, making this a completely pointless exercise.

The other area duplicate content is often found is within the same website, quite often with a completely legitimate reason. The way to deal with this problem is to use a robot.txt file to block Google from visiting the page with the duplicate content.

The best way to get rewarded for your website is to just simply write great unique content.