What is Quality Content?

[jcorkern]

With the year of the Panda in the past now, but warnings of new and updated panda assaults on the webmasters of the world, can anyone give detailed ideas of what quality content is?

Before turning everyone lose with their answers, i figured I would share a little information that i have acquired with hundreds and hundreds of hours of data gathering.

The top 3 sites in the SERP's now has an average of about 2,300 words in the content, not counting navigation and ads.

Keyword density is far less than 1% total per phrase in exact math or phrase match. This is from a sample of over 1000 different 2 to 4 word phrases.

I have noticed that the longer the content, the more ranking achieved with that said content with a lot fewer links.

From what I am seeing, the more detailed and subdivided the content is, the more traffic you get with a lot less SEO efforts. Let me give you an example.

Let's say we are going to write an article about growing tomatoes, and we want high quality content that will help our visitors get the most information they can without bouncing.

An example layout might end up something like this.

Title: How to grow tomatoes

Subtitle 1: History of tomatoes
content with history

Subtitle 2: Breeds:
content

subtitle 3: GMO vs Organic
content

subtitle 4 Soil Prep:
Content

Subtitle 5 Pest control:
content

Subtitle 6 : Companion Planting
content

subtitle 7: Methods
Like greenhouses, containers etc...

Resources

close.

You could go deeper if you like, but this is my example of how deep you may have to go to actually get "G" to look at your content as "quality".

It seems that with LSI (Latent Symantec Indexing) getting stronger and stronger with each algo push, onpage factors seem to have less and less to do with rankings while a more natural flow to the content seems to win the graces of Google, Yahoo and Bing these days.

Any other thoughts?

P.S. This is not a cookie cutter template, use your head and format your articles the way it makes sense.

 

[Joseph Ratliff]

Hey jcorkern, love the discussion starter.

My opinion on "quality content" differs from most, as I'm from the camp of "write for people, not for search engines."

I skip all the technical "mumbo-jumbo" and just write, so that when people find my writing I get something more valuable than ALL the SEO combined... a person that becomes devoted reader of my content. No, I don't get hundreds of thousands of visitors to my site as a result, but I DO get to work towards the 1000 "true fans" etc...

So, I think "quality content" is this:

You write about the subject your site is about, and DON'T worry about keywords, or LSI, or anything "techie"... you just write. The keywords will come out naturally as you talk about your subject on your website...and I really do think this is what Google is aiming for with their algorithm (obviously, NO ONE knows for sure).

Your result by doing this? You end up with not only quality content...but your personality comes through in your content, thereby attracting the people who you really want to do business with.

It's worked for me at least

I'm absolutely 100% sure I miss the boat on the SEO stuff though.

Oh yeah, and quality content to me means NO spinners, NO rehashed PLR content that appears on 1000 other sites, it means personally-written and valuable content that site visitors get value from...period.

Harder to build a business around this? Yep.

Will most people do this? Nope.

Is it a solid way to INSTANTLY position your business away from spinner sites? Abso-friggin-lutely.

 

[jcorkern]

Joseph Ratliff,

I feel the same exact way you do, and I do personalize mine also, I guess I was trying to get across the point that if you do not really break the topic down, you are leaving out valuable details that you need to inform the viewers about, giving them everything they need to cross reference, validate and learn from.

I can tell you absolutely that I am getting more traffic from the sheer amount of content on the longer and more detailed post, but yeah, you absolutely have to put your heart into it or the visitors will see you as a marketer instead of a trusted friend, and that will make all the difference in getting natural links and why most .gov and edu sites do not have the same traffic and natural linking patterns that most personal sites with the same information.

Mechanical info is "boaring", but a friend sharing information is a blast for anyone!

 

[TheSocial]

Hi jcorkern. Thanks for the detailed information. My thought is to keep the golden rule: "write for people not for search engines". If any post is shorter than average but exactly to the point it should be better than a long one.

 

[jcorkern]

"If any post is shorter than average but exactly to the point it should be better than a long one"

While i understand this and the average person understands this, their data and models may indicate that the longer article are more satisfying than the smaller one. We cant say absolutely, but since the top 3 positions over a large path of keywords and phrases average 2300 words, I am somewhat leaning towards the longer versions if the quality is equal or close.

This is by no means an absolute because there are over 200 admitted "signals" that google reads to place sites. We just have to keep testing. Google is getting smarter, so nothing is out of the question.

 

[Bruce61]

Hi good conversation., but about "The top 3 sites in the SERP's now has an average of about 2,300 words in the content, not counting navigation and ads."

I find that there are still a lot of low content homepages out there. Many people like the glamorous news feed concept with flash boxes that resize when you put your cursor over them.

No i dont do this, as it doesnt help me for seo or my visitors, but I also read a very valuable google analysis that said that they found on average the top ranking pages were about 400 words in total.