by If you have been doing SEO for at least 3 months, you probably realized the importance of content to the optimization of your website. However you perceive it, SEO is inseparable from quality content. I will explain that to you in a simple analogy.
The Importance of Helpful and Unique Quality Content in SEO
You might know that Google is the most used search engine and that 95% of search engine users use Google, while the rest use yahoo, bing, duckduckgo, etc. Here, I will compare Google, as the number 1 food critic in the world, where anything Google says about a restaurant will impact heavily on its customer flow and of course, that also affects its continuity.
Then whom or which is the restaurant here? The restaurant is every website in the world. Every single restaurant owner will desperately try to invite Google to taste their food and hope that Google likes the food and the service. Well, that food here is your website content. So what Google did here is actually a simple thing, looking for unique food to try and if it’s good, he will recommend it. And if people are satisfied by that recommendation, then it will also increase that food critic’s fame.
As the “restaurant” owner, you must provide the best for Google, all for the sake of a piece of good review. So if you know Google is going to visit your place, you must prepare the best food, not only that, but also decorate the place, train your waiters, and several other things.
Although, it’s not really a matter how you serve (Web Design) and how your waiters serve Google, the most important thing for a food critic is obviously, the food. So no matter how appetizing your food, how amazing the plating or even how good your waitress, if you don’t serve the food that will satisfy this top food critic, don’t even hope your restaurant name is on the list that Google will recommend.
And don’t even think about bribery. Just imagine, the top critic, where 95% of people follow his recommendation, accepts a bribe for some shabby restaurant that people think would be hidden gems, but it actually just a hidden turd. Well, we can see those 95 will go down sooner or later.
That’s why if you want to be recommended, the most important thing you do is to improve your food quality. If you are able to create, let’s say, an original dish, never seen before and absolutely delicious, there is no way Google wouldn’t visit your place, regularly even, to try your menu. Why? Because Google will see that your restaurant is worth recommending and that’s also what google needs, something to recommend to people, well, it’s his job after all, aside from tasting food.
I hope that you could understand from that analogy. In other words, if you can create unique content that is also informative and useful, half of this SEO “war” is in your bag. For you newbies in this Optimizing thing, the first thing you must learn is how to make helpful and unique quality content.
How to Serve Content that Satisfy Google
>> What kind of Content that Google Likes
Less Picture, More Text
If you want high rank for your website, then either your site is a blog or online shop, make sure you put plenty of words. Even though you can put an alt image on an image object, Google will put text content as a priority to determine your rank.
As you can see from existing marketplace such as wallmart, target, they already know the importance of text in SEO. Pretty sure you never see a product without description at all. If you have woocommerce wordpress online shop, don’t forget to fill the product’s category and product’s tag. If needed you can even get some professional help to fix your theme, so you can put the description without messing up the current theme. Our team may help you to attain this.
Make Sure Your Content is Unique
You might think you can just copy another site’s content and post it on your site. Well, maybe it can still work back then, but those days have been long gone. Back to our food critic, there is no way he will recommend the same old boring food. What he wants is something unique, fresh and tasty.
Now you can throw “the art of copy paste” far away from SEO, it won’t even work well even if you change it a little or give it some opening and closing, it will not make Google index your duplicate article, moreover, getting a high rank. The era of copy paste has been over. Our Covenant Team already tested using duplicate content and those kinds of articles are hardly indexed by google.
Then what if you don’t know how to create your own content? Easy, just buy it. There are several services that will give you quick and fast content. But how about quality? Too bad you must check it yourself or get someone you trust to check it, because sometimes the content they serve are low quality. The writer sometimes makes mistakes. No matter how trustworthy he is, you must double check it. Luckily, you don’t need to worry much about the duplicate, because you can check it on an accurate online plagiarism checker service like UniqueText. Aside from that you can also check it on Copyscape, although it’s more expensive. I will make a separate review post about copyscape and how UniqueText with all of it’s benefits can become an alternative for copyscape.
*update: Here is the Copyscape Plagiarism Checker Review I promised
You might find free duplicate checkers online like smallseotools, duplichecker, prepostseo, and I’ll just say it’s not recommended to use those sites. Sure, it’s free, but it’s accuracy is just too low, and if you check your content using those tools, it will only bring harm to your sites. Moreover, those tools are easily manipulated. With just some little adjustment, and bam, those “meh” articles from your “trusted” writer become original content with no duplicate found. Then you try to use free 2000 words from UniqueText and it shows that your content is 80% copy. Well, we don’t want that to happen, so use a real duplicate checker.
Make Sure It’s a Useful Content
“How about, I’ll just type randomly. Then I will create unique content quickly and easily.” Yeah, no. Of course you wouldn’t spend much time on that kind of unreadable script. You can also order that kind of low quality content for cheap. But that will be a complete waste of money, because Google won’t give it a good rank.
You might wonder, “How can Google differentiate between a good and a bad article? Aren’t they both equally unique?”. The answer is, that’s how advanced Google bots nowadays. Google bot is able to define how a user experiences their visit to a website.
User experience is how a web visitor behaves when visiting your website. As Google Chrome became the main browser in most of the devices, it makes google easier to track every visitor in your website. Let’s say you have a gibberish article, weird placement of punctuation, “spinned” illogical words and sentences, no need to even think that most of your visitors will immediately close your site. Google will mark this as a bad point for your website. And if you don’t fix that, it will affect your site’s rank sooner or later.
You really need to take user experience seriously. As for now this is one of the most important factor that determine your site’s rank in google search.
So, if you want a high ranked website, you must provide it with an article that is really helpful or at least contains interesting information. You might also need to observe your competitor, what kind of content they are posting then you can post different content or add something valuable that your competitors do not provide. Then your site’s visitors will most likely share what they see. And as Google values the user experience, it will see that your site getting high traffic and Google will put your site up on the rank.
>> Google’s Preferred Method of Presenting Content
Lengthy Article
Actually, there isn’t really a specific length for a good article, because it relies mostly on the subject. But according to our experience, it’s hard to get it indexed by Google if it’s too short. So, I’d say at least 500 words. That is our team’s standard.
Provide Some Data
Don’t bother making some content that is similar to the others and has no extra value. It’ll only be another rock on the road. As I said, try to make your content better, such as adding data. Why? Because users like to see some data. You can add statistics, tables, or even infographics to your content. It will make your visitor want to share it. That is our guideline, if user like your content, so do Google.
Place Your Header Correctly
Headers serve to separate one big topic into smaller sub-topics. This will make your article more understandable. Like I use in this article. This article has several headers. H1 for title, H2 for sub-topic, H3 for parts of the sub-topic, H4 for even smaller part, etc.
Sub Header is also useful for full-length articles (remember Google likes that). You can also combine that with a table of contents. It will help your visitor to skim through your whole article fast and read the part that they need. For you wordpress users, there are also several wordpress plugins that you can utilize. Just search the keyword “table of contents” on the plugin and you can choose the one that suits your needs.
Synergize Your Articles
If you want to highlight one of your article or webpage, make sure it’s not stand on its own. For example, one of this web selling point is an online plagiarism checker tool with a wordpress plugin that is able to highlight the duplicate part. So it lets the user edit the duplicate part directly in the wordpress post editor. Because it is an important page and needs highlighting, we create a few supporting pages for it. We made several content with the same topic to complete that plagiarism checker page, one of those content is this post.
We will also post some plagiarism checker wordpress plugin reviews as a comparison to our service. Google will evaluate that our web has enough authority to explain and helping users about plagiarism. It will boost keywords that have relation with that topic. And because those support articles include links to our main page, then Google will consider that main page important.
Stop Over-Optimized
When you do SEO things, you will also learn how to predict some potential keywords on Google. Mostly, you will try to determine keywords that are worth optimizing and focus on your content according to those keywords. But the thing is, some people are too focused with the keywords, hence their article mentions that keyword too much and do you know that sometimes it could be sickening if you realize that some word or phrase is getting too repetitive.
Google’s AI learns your article and will know which keyword that you optimize. The problem is, Google can’t be manipulated by this trick anymore. Maybe back then, this trick still worked and many wordpress plugins exploited this. But now Google AI is aware of this and doing this trick won’t raise your site’s rank for that over-repetitive keyword, rather, your rank for said keyword will be lowered. Perhaps I will release a tool to check those repetitive keywords in your article. You can wait for it!
For conclusion, I’ll just say focus your content to satisfy the reader, not for google’s bot optimization thingy. Re-read your post, especially if it’s made by the others. Do you feel good reading it? Is it informative to you? Would it be useful for you? Google might always develop better algorithms to determine rank, but a good article is always a good article, and that’s also what Google is aiming for.
That’s all that I want to share about the importance of unique and high-quality articles in SEO. If you have another suggestion or some correction, you can put it in the comment below. Because everything I wrote here is from my experience, so it’s not an absolute thing. Thank you!
