Tag Archives: Quality Content

Why quality content writing improves your SEO

Leave a reply
Quality content writing improves your SEO

Quality content writing improves your SEO

In this blog post you will learn how quality content writing improves your SEO.

Text is everywhere. All the home automation devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home, although powered by voice commands, in the background, work on text.

Search engine rankings are based on the textual content on your website or blog.

Even cryptic information residing in the deep artificial intelligence lives and breathes in the form of text.

What I’m saying is, content writing isn’t going anywhere despite big push towards video and imagery.

Read this detailed article from The Atlantic on how many major publications were pushed to the brink of collapse (including Facebook) when they fired their writers in favor of videographers.

Yes, every form of content has its importance but ultimately, everything boils down to writing.

Try publishing just videos or just images on your website and blog, and see what happens to your SEO.

Quality content writing and SEO are interlinked.

Vis-à-vis SEO, what does quality content writing mean?

What does quality content writing mean in terms of SEO?

What does quality content writing mean in terms of SEO?

The quality attribute is multifaceted when it comes to writing for the web, especially to improve your SEO.

I’m using the example of search engine optimization because this is the focal issue of this particular blog post, otherwise, I never advise you to solely aim for SEO. Aim for quality content and SEO is automatically taken care of.

Quality here means it solves your purpose. What is your purpose?

Get more business, of course.

But, there are many stages in between – from someone realizing that he or she needs what you have and then that someone not just finding you, but deciding to do business with you. Many stages.

These are the stages when most of the business is lost.

The job of quality content is to convince people into believing you and then deciding to pay you for what you are offering.

For that, you need to improve your conversion rate.

Your conversion rate can only be improved when you are able to convince people.

Since you cannot convince 100% visitors who come to your website, you have to somehow figure out the maximum number of visitors you can convince into doing business with you.

Suppose, 5%.

This means, if 100 visitors come to your website, 5 of them become your customers or clients.

With the same conversion rate, if you want to get 50 customers or clients, you need to get 1000 visitors.

How do you get these 1000 visitors? You have 3 options:

  1. Improve your SEO for your targeted keywords
  2. Become active on social media
  3. Use paid advertising

If you want to use paid advertising, it must be in your scheme of things.

But if you don’t want to use paid advertising and you would like to go for a more sustainable mode of generating targeted traffic to your website, you will improve your SEO and you will become more active on social media, and for both these activities, you need quality content.

The quality of your content writing began to matter first on social media – nobody would care for you if you didn’t provide value – and then even Google began to change its algorithm to rank only quality content.

So, it isn’t important what you write and what you publish, what’s important is, how people react to it.

If they don’t react to it properly, even the search engines ignore it.

Quality content writing improves your SEO – explained

Your SEO these days solely depends on how valuable, purposeful and relevant your content is.

Why?

Why must people find your content when they look for a certain keyword or search term?

You may say that they must find you so that you get a chance to promote your products or services to them, once they are on your website or blog.

Fair enough. Even I want that.

But what about those people who are searching? What do you give them?

Now, if you didn’t face much competition, you could easily say that if someone is looking for a web designer, he or she should come to your website because you provide web design services.

In my case, if someone is looking for a professional content writer, he or she should come to my website because I provide professional content writing services.

There are thousands of web designers. Also there are thousands of content writers.

People who appear for “web designer” and “content writer” on the first top 10 search engine results, have definitely done something to appear there.

They must have gotten scores of quality back links.

They must be quite active on social media to elicit lots of positive response from their followers.

The must have lots of quality content on their websites so that their bounce rate is very low (a high bounce rate is bad for your SEO).

They must have been in the game for quite some time – the age of their domains must be very old.

People searching for products, services and information have no personal interest in finding your website or blog.

Even Google doesn’t have any personal stake in your website. The search engine solely depends on the algorithm and it’s the algorithm that decides the rankings of your individual links.

Now, this algorithm is constantly evolving.

For a machine, no matter how evolved artificial intelligence gets, it is very difficult to gauge the true value of a piece of content.

This is why Google heavily relies on the reaction of people.

I’m writing this blog post on “why quality content writing improves your SEO”.

Based on my existing rankings Google may rank this blog post in whichever manner.

Then it begins to gather data about how people interact with this piece of content on the Google search engine itself, and also on other websites and social media platforms.

People retweet my tweet with this link – good, Google notches up my rankings perceptibly or imperceptibly.

People like my update carrying this link on Facebook and they also leave comments and they may even share my update. Another boost to my rankings.

When people find my link in search results they come to this blog post and read it.

The more time people spend on this link, the more Google gets convinced that this link solves the purpose of the search query that was used to find this link. Hence, improve its rankings.

If most of the people no longer search for the same query after accessing my link, Google assumes that my link solves the purpose of the query and further improves its rankings.

The cycle goes on and my link keeps moving up.

Now, why would people react positively to this particular link?

They are not emotionally attached to me or my website. Most of them don’t even know me. They couldn’t care less about my SEO.

The only reason they retweet or share my link is because they like it and they like it only because I provide quality content to them. This can only be achieved through quality content writing.

Again, why would people spend more time on this link?

Because they have a reason to go on reading the matter. They find the content useful. This brings down the bounce rate of this link or blog post.

They have no personal interest in lingering on the blog post without reason. The only reason is, they are getting what they were looking for.

Best possible scenario: they don’t go back to Google with the same search query. They don’t check out other links for the same search query.

This indicates to Google that the link solves the purpose of the search query and the user no longer has to check out other links.

These things can only happen if you provide quality content, relevant content, content that is engaging, useful and solves the purpose.

If you focus on providing value to your visitors, you don’t have to worry about your search engine rankings because search engine rankings these days depend less on how you use your keywords, and more on how people react to your content.

Their reactions decide your SEO.

So, when writing content, simply focus on getting positive, constructive reaction from your visitors. The rest is taken care of on its own.

Why I’m negotiating with my clients less and less for better content writing

Leave a reply
Saying "no" to negotiations

Saying “no” to negotiations

Around a year ago when I changed my targeting I became quite open to negotiating my rates with my new clients. I was too eager to take up new assignments because I was trying to get into an entirely new market.

Since then, two things have happened and now I’m negotiating with my clients less and less.

  1. Lowering the rates more than I can comfortably offer reduces the quality of my work.
  2. I have got enough work on the rates I need to deliver quality.

Why negotiations are harmful for quality content writing?

I’m not saying negotiations are always bad – every business, every company does them and besides, everybody is entitled to a good bargain.

In my case, I always offer the best rate I can offer. I always feel uncomfortable offering a higher rate assuming that the client will ask me to lower it and then I should say something like, “Okay, fine, I will do it at a discount for you.” Feels like cheating. Doesn’t sound dignified.

This is why, I charge just the right amount I think I should be making while delivering high-quality content writing.

The rates that I charge allow me to spend good time writing good content. If a charge less, then I have to make it up by focusing more on quantity and less on quality which is not good for my clients, and more importantly, not good for my own skill.

Yes, it puts off many clients, but then, there ARE clients who find my rates fine and eagerly pay me what I ask.

How to write content for Google’s human quality raters

Leave a reply
Writing content for Google's human quality raters

Writing content for Google’s human quality raters

Do you know Google has its official human search quality raters?

Around 10,000.

Google has been seeking help from human quality raters since 2005.

Here is a Search Engine Land update on the search quality rater guidelines update that Google recently released.

Here is the copy of the guidelines.

Not to totally rely on its algorithms, these Google human quality raters are given actual searches to conduct, drawn from real searches on Google. Then these quality raters have to rate the top results.

It has been said for a long time that your content writing should be more for humans and less for search engine algorithms.

Write content for humans first

Write content for humans first

But this is because it is often believed that the ranking algorithms are as good as humans and when they are ranking your content, they are using many human factors.

Though, this is still true and when you write content you should still focus more on the “human side”, the fact that Google uses actual human search quality raters makes it more important that you write content centered around actual people rather than trying to trick the search engines.

Most of the SEO websites say that the human quality raters have no direct bearing on your search engine rankings. For example, if a human quality rater doesn’t like your content and reports your content to Google, your rankings may not suddenly dip.

The data from the quality raters is used for experiments in the Google search lab.

Does it mean you shouldn’t care for the opinion of the human quality raters when you are writing content? I wouldn’t advise that.

Simply because, you should anyway be writing for humans, even if you merely want to improve your search engine rankings and nothing else.

What do these human quality raters look for when evaluating your content?

Word to the Google human quality raters look for?

Word to the Google human quality raters look for?

According to the latest guidelines (linked to above) aside from the quality of the content and the genuineness of what is being said, the human quality raters from Google must also take into consideration the “reputation” of the author.

In the guidelines, this text appears: “Reputation of the website or the creator of the main content”.

What does this mean?

The author reputation has been in the reckoning for a long time. Reputation means how well you are known in your field.

In my case, how many people know that I provide content writing services? What do they have to say about my services? Do they like to link to my blog posts?

Algorithmically the Google algorithm can find out how many people are linking to you and how many people are talking about your content on social media and social networking websites, but, according to the current technology, only humans can detect what sort of conversations happen around your content and about your name.

For example, even if you are notorious the Google algorithm may think you have a good reputation simply because many people are bitching about you.

The human quality raters will be able to find out if people say good things about you or bad things.

Another significant point is “beneficial purpose” – what do visitors gain when they visit your website.

This SEMPost blog post explains the new updated guidelines, point by point.

Why it is important to take Google’s human quality raters seriously when writing your content?

Whoever writes about Google’s human quality raters stress upon the point that the ratings don’t impact your search engine rankings immediately.

Most of the findings are used for research purposes and experimentation.

If this is the case, if it doesn’t matter how they think of your website, why you should bother about them?

One reason is, you never know when Google decides to take their opinions seriously and make them a part of its ranking algorithm.

Although artificial intelligence is rapidly reducing reliance on humans, what humans can find, still, artificial intelligence cannot. You don’t want to get caught off guard, the way you were after the Panda and Penguin updates.

The second reason is, most of the guidelines are also applicable to Google’s core ranking algorithm.

Hence, if you write content targeting Google’s human quality raters, you automatically write content for better SEO.

Writing content for Google’s human quality raters

The most significant thing that is emerging out of the new guidelines is the reputation factor.

It is easier to enjoy better search engine rankings if you have a good reputation.

Take for example Seth Godin. Everyone who reads about Internet marketing or digital marketing must know about him.

If he writes even a 200-word blog post about marketing, it will be ranked better than your 5000-word blog post on the same topic, no matter how comprehensive your topic is, if you don’t publish content regularly, and not many people know about you.

This is how even real life works.

Now, I’m not saying this is DEFINITELY going to happen, because rankings depend on many other factors, but this is how reputation works according to Google’s human quality raters’ guidelines.

How do you improve your reputation?

Improving your reputation with quality content writing

Improving your reputation with quality content writing

The foundation of reputation is, high-quality content, published regularly. You cannot even think of building your online reputation without high-quality, useful content.

A few months ago I wrote about how to write content for the Google RankBrain system. This system primarily focuses on the searcher’s intent.

When someone searches for information on Google and then comes across your link, and then clicks the link and goes to your website or blog, does he or she find the information he or she intended to find?

Does his or her search stop after having visited your website or blog, or does he or she have to come back to Google and carry on the search?

This is a very pertinent question and it can have a long-term impact not just on your search engine rankings, but also on your overall conversion rate.

If your content solves searcher’s intent, you are publishing relevant, high-quality content.

Then what happens?

People want to link to valuable content. So, they do. They start referring to you as an authority figure. Reputation improves.

People start quoting you because they respect your wisdom. Reputation improves.

People share your content on their social media timelines with greater frequency and when they do, there is lots of activity in terms of “Likes” and “Sharing”. Reputation improves.

Your search engine rankings improve. More of your content is found for relevant search terms and then people go to your website from search engines. They find your content useful. Reputation improves.

Branding is very important.

This is why, even renowned brands use reputed individuals to spread the word around rather than using one of their own experts.

The best example is, search for mobile phone reviews on YouTube. You will find a successful YouTuber explaining the features of the latest iPhone rather than someone from Apple. This is because people trust their favorite YouTuber more than they trust some unknown technologist from Apple.

Listed below are some content writing tips to help you write content for Google’s human quality raters:

  1. Focus on relevance.
  2. Always deliver value.
  3. Focus on one topic at a time.
  4. Solve real problems.
  5. Write shorter, crisp sentences.
  6. Encapsulates the entire essence of your blog post or web page within the main headline.
  7. Organize your main points under various headings, subheadings and bulleted points.
  8. Come to the point as fast as you can.
  9. Become socially active through publishing high-quality content and encouraging engagement around it.
  10. Write and publish content regularly because more content means more content for Google to index and more content for people to talk about and react to.

Conclusion

As you can see, most of the tips to write content for Google’s human quality raters are also applicable to general SEO writing guidelines.

Hence, the age-old wisdom is always applicable: focus on quality and relevance; publish persistently and make it easier for people to find and share your content on search engines and social media and social networking websites.

What is quality content and how does Google recognize it?

Leave a reply

what-is-quality-content-and-how-does-Google-define-or-recognize-itIf you want to enjoy good search engine rankings you need to understand how Google defines or recognizes quality content.

Since the Penguin and Panda updates Google has been putting more and more stress on quality content. All its ranking algorithms are focused towards crawling, indexing and ranking as much quality content existing on the Internet as possible.

Read 20 Evergreen characteristics of quality content

In order to understand what is quality content and how Google defines or recognizes it, you first need to define for yourself what is quality content.

For me, the definition of quality content is quite straightforward:

  1. Well-written content
  2. Content that educates and informs
  3. Content that does not mislead
  4. Content that delivers on the promise of the page title or the headline
  5. And in terms of copywriting, contend that improves your conversion rate

These are the basic definitions of what is quality content and these definitions don’t change no matter what the format of your content is. Whether you are publishing text, images or videos, the underlying purpose is to provide quality content that delivers value, whatever that value is, to your particular audience.

Read Why quality content writing matters and how to maintain quality

Why should you bother how Google defines or recognizes quality content?

Although there are multiple search engines in the world Google sends you the most traffic. So, this is why it matters to you how Google defines or recognizes quality content and then ranks your content accordingly.

As you can see in the chart below, almost 90% of the search market is dominated by Google whereas other “major” search engines like Bing, Yahoo! and even Baidu, have more or less remained at the bottom.

Google-search-marketing-share-2016-2017

But carefully note the red line representing Google at the top. If you notice, there is a slight downward slant. Although it is still miles ahead of its competitors, it is losing market. Since most of its revenue comes from search advertising, even a small drop in the share of search traffic means a lot to Google.

for-google-search-is-equal-to-money

So there are two reasons why you should bother how Google defines quality content:

  1. Most of your search traffic comes from Google
  2. Google would tenaciously like to hold onto its market dominance by continuing to provide quality content through searches

If Google is unable to find quality content – no matter how it defines it – people will move on to other search engines.

Give Google quality content and Google will rank your website or blog higher

give quality content to googleThis is not completely true, but it is indisputable that Google will only rank you higher if you have quality content on your website or blog. I have personally experienced that quality content alone doesn’t help you much unless you have tons of it. There are many other factors that affect your ranks including:

  1. The quality of your content, of course
  2. The frequency with which you publish content (the greater the frequency, the better the rankings)
  3. The quantity of quality content that you already have
  4. The age of your domain
  5. The keywords and search terms that you use in the title tag and the headlines
  6. The number of authority websites linking to your content
  7. The social validation your content gets (how many people share your content on social networking websites)
  8. The popularity of your content

A cocktail of these reasons gives you better search engine rankings but all these reasons originate from the fact that you need to have quality content.

Read How to strike a balance between SEO and quality content writing

If you don’t have quality content nobody is going to bother about it and if they don’t bother about it, they won’t share it, they won’t link to it and your content won’t get validation. Without getting social validation, it is very difficult to enjoy good search engine rankings no matter how much quality content you have (although it does have some benefits).

In fact, Google wants quality content so much that it has even created a tutorial on how you can create quality, valuable content.

Googles-course-on-how-to-create-quality-content

How does Google define quality content and then ranks it accordingly?

quality-content-according-to-google

To understand how Google defines quality content, again, you need to understand why Google craves for quality content and not for every type of content irrespective of what its quality is.

Why do you use Google and not another search engine? There might be two reasons:

  1. You are not aware of the existence of any other search engine
  2. You believe that Google gives you the best results for your searches

It’s the second reason that keeps Google hungry for quality content. Whenever you do a search on Google, Google wants to find you the best results. If it doesn’t find you the best results, gradually some other search engine will, and you will move on to that search engine.

This is why among the most brilliant minds on earth working at Google are constantly creating algorithms to find quality content on the Internet.

Now that we know why you need to bother with how Google defines or recognizes quality content and why Google craves quality content, we can come to the topic of how Google defines quality content.

Listed below are the examples of inferior content, according to Google:

  • Scrapped content
  • Thin content (Read What is thin content according to Google? Does it harm your SEO?)
  • Doorway pages
  • Pages and blog posts senselessly stuffed with your keywords
  • Webpages and blog posts solely created to draw traffic with no value
  • Content containing hidden text or links
  • Cloaking
  • Automatically generated text strings
  • Content lifted as it is from other websites and blogs

The folks at Google dislike inferior content or low-quality content so much that they penalize your website by lowering its rankings or worse, completely removing your links from its index.

You may also like to read quality content guidelines straightaway from Google.

Listed below are a few factors that Google uses to define quality content:

  1. Write content for your users not merely for search engines.
  2. Provide information people are actually looking for – don’t mislead people by deceptive titles.
  3. If possible write expert-level content. According to this Search Engine Journal blog post, Google’s human raters as well as algorithms can distinguish between content written by an amateur and content written by a pro.
  4. Become a resource. Link to high quality content from other websites and blogs. Cite reputed publications like the New York Times and Time whenever possible. When you come across quality content on other websites, refer to it from your own website.
  5. Publish fresh content as much as possible. Google is ravenous about fresh content. It crawls your website or blog repeatedly, sometimes multiple times a day to check whether you have published something new. Though, publishing with great frequency doesn’t mean you compromise on quality content. Publish less, but definitely stick to quality.
  6. Abundantly use images and videos. It enhances your presentation and it has been observed that the top 10 ranked sites in Google search results normally have around 6-8 images.
  7. Deliver what you promise in your web page title. Misleading titles attract penalty from Google. Your page title and content should always match.
  8. Create lengthy posts and webpages. Since it is difficult to create long content, and if you are publishing lots of long content, the Google algorithm assumes that you are publishing quality content. Longer blog posts and articles also tend to have lots of information and useful images.

These are the factors using which Google defines quality content. These factors may not play a crucial role all the time at the same time, a majority of these factors are considered when Google tries to assess whether you are publishing quality content or not.

What is thin content according to Google? Does it harm your SEO?

Leave a reply

what-is-thin-content-according-to-GoogleThin content according to Google is little or no original content. Google wants to provide information-rich search results to its users so obviously it doesn’t like it when valueless content appears at the top of the search results. This is why when Google considers your content as “thin content”, it penalizes your website and consequently, this harms your SEO.

What sort of content is thin content according to Google?

Many web owners start generating meaningless content hoping that this would improve their search engine rankings. This can be auto generated content. It can be doorway pages. It can be scrapped content (a web script visit pages and scraps contents of them). It can be duplicate content – same content but different headlines.

The content that is not generated by a human after due thought is basically thin content. Google has advanced algorithms to make out if you are generating thin content to improve your SEO.

It is not entirely true though. Even human-generated content can be thin content. For example, you have been creating webpages and blog posts that are just 200-300 words. This can be termed as thin content. In itself it cannot be harmful for your SEO but what would Google prefer? 200-300 words on a topic by you or 1500 words on the same topic by someone else?

This is what Google has to say about thin content:

Some webmasters attempt to improve their pages’ ranking and attract visitors by creating pages with many words but little or no authentic content. Google will take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other cookie-cutter pages that don’t add substantial value to users.

Here is a video where Matt Cutts describes thin content

Although thin content was in vogue in the early 2000’s and mid-2000’s, some ill-informed website owners and SEO experts still think that quickly generating lots of content can get them good search engine rankings.

The problem may lie in the fact that by fluke sometimes the websites begin to get good rankings but these rankings don’t last. Sooner or later these people get caught but before they get caught, there is so much noise about their fete that many more people get misguided.

The story has it that Google Panda was released precisely to tackle the problem of thin content.

Difference between thin content and curated content

Content curation is a very good content marketing tactic. You find high quality content on the Internet and then you compile the links on your own blog or website or on your social networking profiles. Read Should you create content or curate content?

Since in content curation you’re basically linking to outside content and you write a couple of paragraphs to briefly describe the content and present your own view, is it also thin content?

Google’s advanced text analyzing algorithms can easily make out whether you are curating content or generating thin content. There are no instances of people being penalized for curating content.

Again, thin content is all about creating lots of useless content in order to generate search engine traffic. Advanced machine analysis can easily make out if you are creating random strings of text with no meaning. If you don’t deliver value and are simply creating blog posts and webpages to use your keywords, Google can make that out. Read 10 tips to write high-quality content extremely fast.

On the other hand, if you are curating high quality content from other websites, Google can make that out too and rank your individual links accordingly.

How to avoid the thin content penalty from Google

Now that you know what is thin content according to Google, how to avoid thin content penalty?

Publish quality content. Publish content that delivers value. Publish content that people would like to share and link to. Read 20 Evergreen Characteristics of Quality Content.

This is precisely the reason why Google takes into account social validation when ranking your webpages and blog posts. If people like your content, Google automatically likes it.

Aside from this, take care of the following steps in order to avoid the thin content penalty from Google:

  1. Use your keywords and search terms but avoid using them needlessly. Read How I select and organize keywords for writing optimized content.
  2. Write content keeping your visitors in mind and not search engine crawlers. Read How to write content for humans but optimize for Google and other search engines.
  3. Try to pack lots of information and lots of research because this will enable you to write long webpages and blog posts, which are preferred by Google.
  4. Make sure there are no spelling and grammar mistakes because low quality content normally has lots of spelling and grammar mistakes.
  5. Create unique content. Read How to help your business stand out with unique content.
  6. Write to impart knowledge, educate people and to provide them help instead of simply writing content to get better search engine rankings.

It is very important that you are careful about the various Google search engine guidelines on creating content. Sometimes, even unintentionally you may end up creating thin content and attract Google penalty consequently.