The importance of content quality

Content quality has been in the spotlight since Google update Panda in 2011. Webmasters and SEO specialists have changed their priority from “spamming” techniques to tactics to improve the quality of site’s content. The latest 80-page report of Searchmetrics is a strong indicator of the influence of great content. The report illustrated the relative relationship between specific tactics and actual changes to sites’ traffics, visibility and rankings throughout a definite period of time. However, keep in mind that those statistics are only for references, as there is no way we can know for sure whether those changes are caused by our listed factors or other mysterious elements inside Search Engines’ system. Even so, we did have hundreds of evidences from reliable sources. Hence, we can assume
those results to be of high level of accuracy.

Searchmetrics has conducted this kind of research for three consecutive years 2012, 2013 and 2014. The data they have collected was from 10000 Google search queries. However, it excludes the tag with a specific outcome such as "Facebook login".

Moreover, in 10000 search terms, Searchmetrics has identified the top three results for any particular query. This result is 90% identical to the outcome of previous studies and 10% remaining are due to the appearance of new queries that have never been existed before (For example: new technology).

The biggest factors affecting rankings:

For any particular query, this study only included the top ranking sites. Specifically, it requires your site to have a coherent structure and a quality platform. In other words, this list cannot be applied to your site if your site possesses any error or of poor quality. It also means that your site must meet certain standards such as not tolerate for any shady navigation, not using any advertising scam, not containing malicious code or malware. In addition, your site should meet some other fundamental requirement like page loading as fast as 2 seconds or titles match with content for a specific topic.

There are several factors that have fallen in influence in the past few years. Among these are domain names containing keywords. Exact-Match Domain has been seriously degraded by the update. In these days, a branded URL is better than a URL that contains the keywords.

The importance of content quality:

Suppose you have an active website with clean penalty sheet, then what are the most beneficial SEO factors? Surely you can say it is content. Here are some interesting facts about content:

The average length of high-quality content in 2014 is 975 words, not included navigation text and form. The best way to make your articles look natural is to dig deeper into the subject content to provide as much useful information as possible.

Best content are those that are comprehensive without unnecessary inserts of keywords. For example, in 2014, Google is definitely able to understand that keyword phrase "new iPhone" is referred to "iPhone 6" even if the term “iPhone 6” does not appear.

Content should be integrated with social media. It has long been recognized as an effective way to optimize your website and so far it has not changed. Use attractive pictures to make your content more interesting and attract the attention of the readers.

- Source: The importance of content quality

- See more: Writing Content That Ranks

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