What is good content to an SEO?

In order to view content appropriately you need to know what you are looking for. So, what is good content? This question is so obvious, it seems silly to ask. Unfortunately, it is so broad, that a straightforward answer would be useless. Instead, I will answer it like most great geniuses who are posed with a difficult question; I will simply change the question.

What is good content to an SEO? 

This is a much more realistic question to answer.

I have thought long and hard about this question and I believe that for SEOs, all good content requires two attributes. Good content must supply a demand and be linkable.

Good content feeds a demand: Just like the world’s markets, information is affected by supply and demand. The best content is that which does the best job of supplying the largest demand. 

• It might take the form of an XKCD comic that is supplying nerd jokes to a large group of technologists who want to laugh. 
• It also might be a Wikipedia article that explains to the world the definition of Web 2.0. 
• It can be a video, an image, sound, or text, but it must satisfy a demand in order to be considered good content.

Good content is linkable: From an SEO perspective, there is no difference between the best and worst content on the Net if it is not linkable. If people can’t link to it, search engines will be very unlikely to rank it, and the content won’t drive traffic to the given website. Unfortunately, this happens a lot more often than you might think. 

• Have you ever been scrolling through an image-based slideshow and seen an image that takes your breath away only to realize that due to its implementation, you have no way to share that individual image? (This happens to me a lot on CNN.com.) 
• Have you ever heard a song online that you wanted to share with a friend but were unable to due to copyright protection software? It is a frustrating experience, and it turns potentially good content into bad content.

Action Checklist

When viewing a website from the 1-foot level, be sure to take notes on the following:

• Identify whether the content satisfies a demand
• Identify whether the content is linkable
• Make sure you are not missing something and viewing the page with a sharp eye

Refer the link
Content is king

Evaluating URL Structure

Along with smart internal linking, SEOs should make sure that the category hierarchy is reflected in URLs.


Take a look at the following good example of URL structure:

http://example.com/Games/Video_Games/History/



Now take a look at the following example of URL structure:

http:// example.com /title/tt0468569/

Unlike the first example, this URL does not reflect the information hierarchy of the website.



Action Checklist

When you are viewing a website from the 10-foot level, be sure to check for and note all of the following:

• Homepage links to every category of pages on the website
• The ability of category pages to help the user and the search engines
• The presence of links on category pages to all applicable
• subcategories (if the given amount of page link juice can sustain it)
• The ability of subcategory pages to help the user and the search engines
• The presence of links on subcategory pages to all applicable content pages
• The relevancy of the given content pages to the given topic
• The ability of the URL structure to match category hierarchy and supplement relevancy

Evaluating Subcategory Pages

If a website is very large it will need to break its categories into subcategories and link to them from the category pages. The subcategory pages should be set up exactly like category pages. The only difference is that instead of linking to more subcategory pages, they should link directly to content pages. Keep in mind that they have less link juice to pass than category pages (because they are more links away from the homepage), s o subcategory pages should contain as few links as possible. This is because the amount of link juice a link passes is determined by both the link popularity of the given page and the number of links it contains.

Similarly to category pages, subcategory pages should do the following:

• Be useful for the user
• Direct link juice to all applicable content pages
• Have enough unique content to be indexed by the search engines

Evaluating Content Pages

Content pages are the meat of websites. They are the reason visitors came to the site, and just like a good breakfast, these pages should leave those visitors feeling fulfilled and smelling of delicious bacon. (I made up that last part, but if a website really did smell like bacon, I would surely link to it.) The pages should be very specific to a given topic (usually a product or an object) and be hyper-relevant.

As an SEO you should be looking to see if the purpose of the page is directly stated in all of the following areas:

• Title tag
• URL
• Content of page
• Images

NOTE Good content pages act as link magnets. They are much more likely to receive links than subcategory and category pages. Smart SEOs use this as an advantage and have content pages link back to their applicable category and subcategory pages. This then increases the amount of juice flowing to all of the content pages on the website and makes them all rank better.

Good Example of a Content Page

The topic of the page is stated in the title tag (Super Mario World –Wikipeda, the free encyclopedia); the URL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_World), the page’s content (Notice the page heading, “Super Mario World”); and again within the alt text of the images on the page.

An Ideal Content Page

An ideal content page should do all of the following:

• Be hyper-relevant to a specific topic (usually a product or single object)
• Include subject in title tag
• Include subject in URL
• Include subject in image alt text
• Specify subject several times throughout text content
• Provide unique content about a given subject
• Link back to its category page
• Link back to its subcategory page
• Link back to its homepage (normally accomplished with an image
• link showing the website logo on the top left of a page)

Multiple Pathways to Content

Well-architected sites can get you to specific pages through multiple pathways. A good site gets you to deep URLs through a logical path with minimal clicks. A great site gets you to deep URLs through any one of several logical paths, and the paths frequently cross throughout the journey. The difference between good and great means more rapid, more thorough indexing; a more appropriate distribution of page authority and authority; and more qualified traffic.

Evaluating Category Pages

If the website has more than 150 pages, it should divide its content into categories and link to those from the homepage. Ideally, these pages should serve both as a landing page for a searcher and a link juice router for search engines. Many webmasters mistakenly focus on one

of these aspects while ignoring the other. As an SEO, part of your job will be making sure that both of these kinds of visitors are taken care of.

A website with more than 150 pages should divide its content into categories that are useful to both humans and search engines alike.

Evaluating Homepages

Ideally, the homepage should link to every single category of pages on a website. Normally, this is accomplished with a global navigation menu (global meaning it is on every web page on the domain). This is easy to do with small websites because if they have less than 150 pages, the homepage could directly link to all of them. (Note this is only a good idea if the homepage has enough links pointing at it to warrant this. Remember the little boy and the ant hill; link popularity is analogous to the amount of water the little boy has. If he doesn’t have enough, he can’t fill every chamber.) Following are some good and bad examples of this.

The Importance of Good Site Architecture

The problem is that the website lacks any kind of traditional site architecture. The link juice (ranking power) coming from the hundreds of thousands of domains that link to this company’s homepage has no way of traveling to the other webpages on this domain. All of the link juice is essentially bottled up at the front door.

Its content is located on at least 20 different domains, and there is no global navigation that leads users or search engines from the homepage down to categorized pages. The company’s online presence is more like a thousand islands rather than the super continent it could be. It is an enormous waste of resources and is directly affecting the company’s bottom line in a real way.

When explaining site architecture to clients, I start out by asking them to visualize a website like an ant hill. All of the chambers are like webpages and the tunnels are like internal links. I then have them imagine a little boy pouring water into the ant hill. He pours it down the main entrance and wants to have it fill all of the chambers. (As a side note, scientists actually have done this with cement to study the structure of ant metropolises. In one case, they had to pour 10 tons of liquid cement into an ant hill before it filled all of the chambers.) In this analogy the water represents the flow of link juice to webpages. As discussed earlier, this link juice (popularity) is essential for rankings.

The optimal structure for a website (or ant hill, if you must) would look similar to a pyramid

NOTE Homepages are almost always the most linked-to pages on a domain. This is because they are the most convenient (the shortest) URL to link to when referring to the website online.

Robots.txt

After analyzing the domain name, general design, and URL format, my colleagues and I look at potential client’s robots.txt and sitemap. This is helpful because it starts to give you an idea of how much (or little) the developers of the site cared about SEO. A robots.txt file is a very basic

step webmasters can take to work with search engines. The text file, which should be located in the root directory of the website (http://www.example.com/robots.txt), is based on an informal protocol that is used for telling search engines what directories and files they are allowed and disallowed from accessing. The inclusion of this file gives you a rough hint of whether or not the developers of the given site made SEO a priority.

Instead, I will tell you a cautionary tale. Bit.ly is a very popular URL shortening service. Due to its connections with Twitter.com, it is quickly becoming one of the most linked websites on the Web. One reason for this is its flexibility. It has a feature where users can pick their own URL. 

For example, when linking to my website I might choose http://bit.ly/SexyMustache. Unfortunately, Bit.ly forgot to block certain URLs, and someone was able to create a shortened URL for http://bit.ly/robots.txt. This opened up the possibility for that person to control how robots were allowed to crawl Bit.ly. Oops! This is a great example of why knowing even the basics of SEO is essential for web based business owners.

After taking a quick glance at the robots.txt file, SEO professionals tend to look at the default location for a sitemap. (http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml). When I do this, I don’t spend a lot of time analyzing it (that comes later, if owners of that website become a client); instead, I skim through it to see if I can glean any information about the setup of the site. A lot of times, it will quickly show me if the website has information hierarchy issues. Specifically, I am looking for how the URLs relate to each other. A good example of information hierarchy would b e www.example.com/mammal/dogs/english-springer-spaniel.html, whereas a bad example would be www.example.com/node? type=6&kind=7. Notice on the bad example that the search engines can’t extract any semantic value from the URL. The sitemap can give you a quick idea of the URL formation of the website.

Don’t Fool Yourself, Looks Matter

Would you feel comfortable leaving your children with a person in a bright orange prison jumpsuit? Of course not! In the same way, visitors to websites are not going to feel comfortable if they are greeted with popups, loud music, and a multicolored skull logo.

Of course those are extreme examples. The common mistakes that I see are more along the line of the following:

• Lack of focus
• Crowded text
• Slow loading times
• Auto-playing music
• Unclear navigation
• Excess redirects

How Important Is a Domain Name?

From a marketing perspective, a domain name is the single most important element of a website. Unlike a brick-and-mortar company, websites don’t have visual cues closely associated with them. Whereas potential customers can use visual cues to identify if a physical building is more likely a barber shop or a bank, they are not able to tell the difference between domain names. All domain names use the exact same format: http:// subdomain dot (optional) root domain dot TLD. Take, for example, http://www.google.com or http://www.bing.com. To an outsider, there is no reason to think that any of these resources would be a search engine. They don’t contain the word search, and if their brands weren’t as strong as they are, their gibberish names wouldn’t mean anything to anyone.

This is where people get confused. They see websites like this and think that the domain name doesn’t matter. They register domains that are hard to pronounce or hard to spell and figure they don’t have to worry. The problem is they don’t realize that the popular websites got popular not because of their domain names, but rather despite their domain names. Google was such an outstanding product with a plan that was executed so well that it could have had been named BackRub and still been successful. (Note: It was originally called BackRub. I am just amusing myself.)

A nonsensical domain name can hurt a website, making it harder for people (and search engines) to find that site and associate with the concepts that the site focuses on.

For the vast majority of websites, a “search friendly” domain name is best. The search engines will always be constrained by the fact that many people search for exact URLs when they want to go to websites. Of course, the most relevant and popular result for the query “myspace.com”

would be www.myspace.com. You can use this to your advantage. Say your clients own a hotel in Jammu. For them, the best domain name would be www.Jammuhotel.com so that they could rank for the query Seattle Hotel.

But what if a killer domain name is not available? You are not alone. As of the time of writing all of the combinations for .com domains with three or fewer characters were already owned. If you can’t get seattlehotel.com, you will just need to be more creative. To limit your ability to hurt yourself by being “too creative,” I advise you to look out for the following when registering a domain name: 

• Avoid hyphens: In domain names, hyphens detract from credibility and act as a spam indicator.
• Avoid generic, uncommon top-level domains (TLDs): Like hyphens, TLDs such as .info, .cc, .ws, and .name are spam indicators.
• Avoid domain names longer than 15 characters: People are lazy; don’t try to make them type a novel just to access your website.

This advice about domains applies mostly to people who are either starting out from scratch, or for whom purchasing a better domain is an option. If you’re an SEO, you’ll probably have clients that are stuck with the domain they have, either due to branding or financial constraints. If that’s you, never fear. While a smartly chosen, keyword-rich domain is often an ideal situation, plenty of sites succeed without one.

how to create a seo friendly website

When professional SEOs first come to a website that they plan to work with, they view it through a very different lens than if they were just idly surfing. They instinctively start viewing it from the perspective of a search engine. The following are the elements that I pay the most attention to.

• How Important Is a Domain Name?
• Don't Fool Yourself, Looks Matter
• Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml
• The Importance of Good Site Architecture
• Evaluating Homepages
• Evaluating Category Pages
• Multiple Pathways to Content
• Evaluating Subcategory Pages
• Evaluating URL Structure

Understand the competitor

Understanding the Neighborhood

Before I do any work on a website I try to get an idea of where it fits into the grand scheme of things on the World Wide Web. The easiest way to do this is to run searches for some of the competitive terms in the website’s niche. If you imagine the Internet as one giant city, you can picture domains as buildings. The first step I take before working on a client’s website is figuring out in which neighborhood its building (domain) resides.

This search result page is similar to seeing a map of the given Internet neighborhood. You usually can quickly identify the neighborhood anchors (due to their link popularity) and specialists in the top 10 (due to their relevancy). You can also start to get an idea of the maturity of the result based on the presence of spam or low-quality websites.

Also, take note that regardless of whether or not you are logged into a Google account, the search engine will automatically customize your search results based on links you click most. This can be misleading because it will make your favorite websites rank higher for you than they do for the rest of the population.

Along with looking at the results themselves, I look at the other data present on the page. The amount of advertisements on the search result gives a rough idea of how competitive it is.

In addition to the ads, I also look for signs of temporal algorithms. Temporal algorithms are ranking equations that take into account the element of time with regards to relevancy. These tend to manifest themselves as news results and blog posts.

Taking Advantage of Temporal Algorithms

You can use the temporal algorithms to your advantage. I accidentally did this once with great success. I wrote a blog post about Michael Jackson’s death and its effect on the search engines a day after he died. As a result of temporal algorithms my post ranked in the top 10 for the query “Michael Jackson” for a short period following his death. Because of this high ranking, tens of thousands of people read my article. I thought it was because I was so awesome, but after digging into my analytics I realized it was because of unplanned use of the temporal algorithms. If you are a blogger, this tactic of quickly writing about news events can be a great traffic booster.

After scanning search result pages for the given website’s niche, I generally get a sense for that neighborhood of the Internet. The important takeaway is to get an idea of the level of competition, not to figure out the ins and outs of how specific websites are ranking. That comes later.

Link Relevancy

Popularity and relevancy are the two concepts that make up the bulk of Search Engine Optimization theory.

In the previous tutorial we have discussed about The Secrets of Relevancy

Now we will understand Link Relevancy.

As search engines matured, they started identifying more metrics for determining rankings. One that stood out among the rest was link relevancy.

The difference between link relevancy and link popularity is that link relevancy does not take into account the power of the link. Instead, it is a natural phenomenon that works when people link out to other content.

Let me give you an example of how it works. Say I own a blog where I write about whiteboard markers. (Yes, I did just look around my office for an example to use, and yes, there are actually people who blog about whiteboard markers. I checked.) Ever inclined to learn more about my passion for these magical writing utensils, I spend part of my day reading online what other people have to say about whiteboard markers.

On my hypothetical online reading journey, I find an article about the psychological effects of marker color choice. Excited, I go back to my website to blog about the article so (both of) my friends can read about it.

Now here is the critical takeaway. When I write the blog post and link to the article, I get to choose the anchor text. I could choose something like “click here,” but more likely I choose something that it is relevant to the article. In this case I choose “psychological effects of marker color choice.”

Someone else who links to the article might use the link anchor text “marker color choice and the effect on the brain.”

People have a tendency to link to content using the anchor text of either the domain name or the title of the page. Use this to your advantage by including keywords you want to rank for in these two elements.

This human-powered information is essential to modern-day search

engines. These descriptions are relatively unbiased and produced by real people. This metric, in combination with complicated natural language processing, makes up the lion’s share of relevancy indicators online.

The Secrets of Relevancy

In the previous tutorial How page is ranked by search engine, I discussed how popular pages (as judged by links) rank higher. By this logic, you might expect that the Internet’s most popular pages would rank for everything. 

To a certain extent they do (think Wikipedia!), but the reason they don’t dominate the rankings for every search result page is that search engines put a lot of emphasis on determining relevancy.

Relevancy is the measurement of the theoretical distance between two corresponding items with regards to relationship. Luckily for Google and Microsoft, modern-day computers are quite good at calculating this measurement for text.

Size of Google Indices

So what does this emphasis on textual content mean for SEOs? To me, it indicates that my time is better spent optimizing text than images or videos. This strategy will likely have to change in the future as computers get more powerful and energy efficient, but for right now text should be every SEO’s primary focus.

But Why Content?

The search engines must use their analysis of content as their primary indication of relevancy for determining rankings for a given search query.

For SEOs, this means the content on a given page is essential for

manipulating—that is, earning—rankings.

In the old days of AltaVista and other search engines, SEOs would just need to write “Jessica Simpson” hundreds times on the site to make it rank #1 for that query. 

What could be more relevant for the query “Jessica Simpson” than a page that says Jessica Simpson 100 times? (Clever SEOs will realize the answer is a page that says “Jessica Simpson” 101 times.) 

This metric, called keyword density, was quickly manipulated, and the search engines of the time diluted the power of this metric on rankings until it became almost useless. Similar dilution has happened to the keywords meta tag, some kinds of internal links, and H1 tags.

The funny thing is that modern-day search engines still work essentially the same way they did back in the time of keyword density. The big difference is that they are now much more sophisticated. Instead of simply counting the number of times a word or phrase is on a webpage, they use natural language processing algorithms and other signals on a page to determine relevancy. 

For example, it is now fairly trivial for search engines to determine that a piece of content is about Jessica Simpson if it mentions related phrases like “Nick Lachey” (her exhusband),“Ashlee Simpson” (her sister), and “Chicken of the Sea” (she is infamous for thinking the tuna brand “Chicken of the Sea” was made from chicken). The engines can do this for a multitude of languages and with astonishing accuracy.

In addition to the words on a page, search engines use signals like image meta information (alt attribute), link profile and site architecture, and information hierarchy to determine how relevant a given page that mentions “Jessica” is to a search query for “The Simpsons.”

How page is ranked by search engine

Domain and Page Popularity

There are hundreds of factors that help engines decide how to rank a page. And in general, those hundreds of factors can be broken into two categories—relevance and popularity (or “authority”). For the purposes of this demonstration you will need to completely ignore relevancy for a second. 

Further, within the category of popularity, there are two primary types—domain popularity and page popularity. 

Modern search engines rank pages by a combination of these two kinds of popularity metrics. These metrics are measurements of link profiles. 

To rank number one for a given query you need to have the highest amount of total popularity on the Internet. (Again, bear with me as we ignore relevancy for this section.)

This is very clear if you start looking for patterns in search result pages. Have you ever noticed that popular domains like Wikipedia.org tend to rank for everything? This is because they have an enormous amount of domain popularity. 

But what about those competitors who outrank me for a specific term with a practically unknown domain? This happens when they have an excess of page popularity. See Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1: Graph showing different combinations of relevancy and popularity metrics that can be used to achieve high rankings 

Although en.wikipedia.org has a lot of domain popularity and get.adobe.com/reader/ has a lot of page popularity, www.awesome.com ranks higher because it has a higher total amount of popularity. 

The Secrets of Popularity

The Secrets of Popularity on Internet

Once upon a time there were two guys at Stanford working on their PhDs. Two of the guys at Stanford were not satisfied with the current options for searching online, so they attempted to develop a better way.

Being long-time academics, they eventually decided to take the way academic papers were organized and apply that to webpages. 

A quick and fairly objective way to judge the quality of an academic paper is to see how many times other academic papers have cited it. 

This concept was easy to replicate online because the original purpose of the Internet was to share academic resources between universities. 

The citations manifested themselves as hyperlinks once they went online. One of the guy came up with an algorithm for calculating these values on a global scale, and they both lived happily ever after.

Of course, these two guys were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, and the algorithm that Larry invented that day was what eventually became PageRank.

Relevance, Speed, and Scalability

Hypothetically, the most relevant search engine would have a team of experts on 

every subject in the entire world—a staff large enough to read, study, and 

evaluate every document published on the web so they could return the most accurate results for each query submitted by users.

The fastest search engine, on the other hand, would crawl a new URL the very second it’s published and introduce it into the general index immediately,available to appear in query results only seconds after it goes live.

The challenge for Google and all other engines is to find the balance between those two scenarios: To combine rapid crawling and indexing with a relevance algorithm that can be instantly applied to new content. 

In other words, they’re trying to build scalable relevance. With very few exceptions, Google is uninterested in hand-removing (or hand-promoting) specific content. Instead, its model is built around identifying characteristics in web content that indicate the content is especially relevant or irrelevant, so that content all across the web with those same characteristics can be similarly promoted or demoted.