When it comes to recognizing high-quality content to decide your search engine rankings on Google, whose guidelines it pays to follow? Of course, Google’s high-quality content guidelines. If you follow them you can certainly improve your SEO.
This Search Engine Land update says that these high-quality content guidelines are basically for Google’s internal content creators.
Your web content is not just text. It comprises of everything a web page typically has including the HTML source code, the images and videos and JavaScript and other web scripts. Therefore, Google has different style guides that can be accessed by you to improve the overall quality of not just the content but also the way your website serves that content to people as well as search engine crawlers. These are the style guides:
You must wonder, if there are so many things that can affect your search engine rankings, why put so much stress on writing SEO content?
This is because SEO content writing is a building block. It paves the way for better search engine ranking. Even if you get everything else sorted out, unless you have high-quality content that is search engine friendly, you’re not going to be able to improve your SEO.
Improve your SEO with the following high-quality content writing guidelines from Google:
Here are a few things you can keep in mind while writing content for your website or blog. Nothing much new is there but it helps to always revise the fundamental concepts of writing well for better search engine rankings.
The guidelines from Google below are mostly for writing purposes, after that the Google guidelines also tell you how to use optimized images for your content. First, content writing…
- Write in a conversational style. It is recommended that you write the way you talk. Since the search engine crawlers will also be accessing your content, try to write very simply so that even a robot can understand what you are writing.
- Sound authoritative and knowledgeable. Remember that Google wants to present content that represents expertise. Your content should help people solve problems. Yes, you can write authoritative, knowledge-written content using simple language.
- Whenever possible try to follow the American writing style for grammar and spelling. This is probably because the Google ranking algorithm mostly uses the American writing style.
- Write simple concise and very short sentences with very simple words so that both your users and robots can understand what you are saying.
- Use numbers and bulleted list when describing steps or when listing multiple points sequentially.
- When you are linking to other websites and blogs make sure that they are reliable and trustable and don’t contain inferior quality content.
How do other web page components help your SEO according to Google guidelines?
- Use svg formatted files or optimized .png files and don’t forget to use the alt text for your image tags.
- Tables are good for organizing information but use them only when you have multiple columns to show.
- This is something new. Do you know <strong> and <b> have different meanings? Whereas <b> is for visual emphasis, <strong> should be shown for text of strong importance.
- Whenever possible keep HTML and CSS separate.
There are various other recommendations in the guidelines but these are the basic ones. You may feel that some of them are for aesthetics but they actually help you create more clear and concise text.
You may not be able to apply all the guidelines when writing content for your website or blog but you can at least stick to the standard guidelines such as using simple language and arranging your information in such a manner that it is easier for the Google crawlers to access your content.
Does following these Google guidelines really help you improve your SEO?
I wouldn’t say no. The guidelines are for the internal Google content creators so the company wouldn’t like to give wrong guidelines to their own content creators. That’s one thing.
The other thing is, in these guidelines there is nothing that goes contrary to writing, creating and publishing quality content. Everywhere it is recommended that you use simple, conversational language while writing content not just for the search engines but also for your visitors. You should use the language that is used by your prospective customers and clients, especially when using the search engines. Images should be optimized and the loading time should be minimized.
Don’t get too bogged down by these guidelines, but inculcate them in your day-to-day content writing habits and you will see an improvement in your SEO by default.