With all the changes our friends at Google are implementing to their algorithm (500 every year, they tell us), it is important to know the latest thinking on creating quality content on your website. Be it a blog post, article or a website page, ‘quality content’ implies something that brings value to readers and is also search engine friendly.
So, creating unique and engaging content will bring more visitors to your website, however you will want to avoid following pitfalls.
Keyword Stuffing
In the old days of SEO, you used to be able to rank well in the search engines by repeating your target key phrase as many times as possible throughout your article. As all search engines have become smarter nowadays this is not possible any more and could even land you in hot water.
Having said that, it is okay to use your keywords throughout the text as long as it makes sense to your readers. Remember, you are really creating content for website visitors and not necessarily for search engines; with good content rankings will follow suit. What is the optimal so called keyword density? There is no particular percentage that can be assigned to it, probably safe to stay under 4%.
Thin and Duplicate Content
By thin content I mean an article, audio or video that lacks unique substance. You can rewrite someone else’s article but does it bring about unique perspective or anything new that the original article may have missed.
As far as duplicate content is concerned, it applies to your own website as well – you don’t want to have pages on your website that have exactly the same content and this includes title and description meta tags. If you are selling similar products on your website for example, put a unique spin to all of them individually.
Irrelevant Title and Description Tags
Just the same way you want to have unique content on every one of your pages, it is highly advisable to have unique title and description tags for each page within your website. These tags need to contain keywords you are targeting but also need to be related to the page content.
This will not only avoid confusing searchers as these meta tags will appear as snippets on search engine results page (SERP), it will also conform to search engine’s guidelines preventing your website from being penalised.
Using Flash and images with very little or no text
Although using Adobe Flash technology to create your pages may make them appealing, it is not ideal for reasons of device compatibility and usability issues as well as search engines not being able to index and recognise Flash, creating problems when ranking your website.
Use text as much as possible and for images that you have on your website – always use the ALT attribute and when possible make an image file name as your targeted key word. Example: ducted-air-conditioners.jpg.
Thanks for such a useful post.
Also, I would like to add that duplicate content might be a real problem, especially if you run an E-commerce. Presence of duplicate content can directly affect your rankings and by saying that I mean you can drop down or even get penalty from Google. In 2011 when Google Panda first appeared it was a real problem for our, because we got completely kicked out of top 10 for most of our keywords.
I kinda lost the track of what I wanted to say 🙂 I think you should also add that using tools like plagspotter (duplicate content checker) can ease their life A LOT. Like, it really takes some time to check the whole site for such problems and with an automated process it takes you just a few minutes.