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I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing. Does Google, the world's wealthiest media company, really only display web pages that meet arcane technical criteria? Does Google, like so many website owners, really get so caught up in the process of the algorithm that it misses the whole point?
Apparently not.
Most Common On-the-Page Website Content Success Factors
Whatever the technical mechanism, Google is doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings.
I looked at Google's top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on June 27, 2005. Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffic delivered by Google.
The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared the following features:
Updating: frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.
Spelling and grammar: few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word's check feature, and then ruling out words marked as misspellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? I can already hear the scoffing on the other side of this computer screen. Before you dismiss the idea completely, keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google's algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same.
Paragraphs: primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.
Lists: both bulleted and numbered, form a large part of the text.
Sentence length: mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together.
Contextual relevance: text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword. The page may contain the keyword itself few times or not at all.
SEO "Do's" and "Don'ts"
A hard look at the results slaughters a number of SEO bugbears and sacred cows.
PageRank. The median PageRank was 4. One page had a PageRank of 0. Of course, this might simply be yet another demonstration that the little PageRank number you get in your browser window is not what Google's algo is using. But if you're one of those people who attaches an overriding value to that little number, this is food for thought.
Frames. The top two web pages listed for the most searched-on keyword employ frames. Frames may still be a bad web design idea from a usability standpoint, and they may ruin your search engine rankings if your site's linking system depends on them. But there are worse ways you could shoot yourself in the foot.
JavaScript-formatted internal links. Most of the websites use JavaScript for their internal page links. Again, that's not the best web design practice, but there are worse things you could do.
Keyword optimization. Except for two pages, keyword optimization was conspicuous by its absence. In more than half the web pages, the keyword did not appear more than three times, meaning a very low density. Many of the pages did not contain the keyword at all. That may just demonstrate the power of anchor text in inbound links. It also may demonstrate that Google takes a site's entire content into account when categorizing it and deciding what page to display.
Sub-headings. On most pages, sub-headings were either absent or in the form of images rather than text. That's a very bad design practice, and particularly cruel to blind users. But again, Google is more forgiving.
Links: Most of the web pages contained ten or more links; many contain over 30, in defiance of the SEO bugbears about "link popularity bleeding." Moreover, nearly all the pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links outnumbered relevant ones. Of course, it's not clear what benefit the website owners hope to get from placing irrelevant links on pages. It has been a proven way of lowering conversion rates and losing visitors. But Google doesn't seem to care if your website makes money.
Originality: a significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, the content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note: the reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free-reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually the majority of the page.
Recommendations
Make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is creating your site's content, particularly in the case of a search-engine optimization campaign. If you are an SEO, make sure you get a pro to do the content. A shocking number of SEOs write incredibly badly. I've even had clients whose websites got fewer conversions or page views after their SEOs got through with them, even when they got a sharp uptick in unique visitors. Most visitors simply hit the "back" button when confronted with the unpalatable text, so the increased traffic is just wasted bandwidth.
If you write your own content, make sure that it passes through the hands of a skilled copyeditor or writer before going online.
Update your content often. It's important both to add new pages and update existing pages. If you can't afford original content, use free-reprint content.
Distribute your content to other websites on a free-reprint basis. This will help your website get links in exchange for the right to publish the content. It will also help spread your message and enhance your visibility. Fears of a "duplicate content penalty" for free-reprint content (as opposed to duplication of content within a single website) are unjustified.
In short, if you have a mature website that is already indexed and getting traffic, you should consider making sure the bulk of your investment in your website is devoted to its content, rather than graphic design, old-school search-engine optimization, or linking campaigns.
As a website copywriter, I hear this myth repeated back to me all the time by new clients and prospects. "Don't bother search-engine-optimizing the content," they say. "Just make sure it is well written and the keywords will flow naturally into the content." Or, they repeat the words of so many self-styled gurus: "don't write for the search engines, write for the people who will be reading what you write."
If you're one of the people who believe there's a conflict of interest between search engines and humans, you're operating under two misconceptions:
* Misconception 1: you know more about what people want to read on the web than the search engines do.
* Misconception 2: you or your writer will just naturally write the content that people or search engines want, without consciously trying to meet their demands.
Why Search Engines Know More about Your Website Visitors than You
"I want a well-written web page, not a list of keywords." It frightens me a bit when I hear this, since it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what search engines do.
A search engine is not simply a massive find function, like the one in the "Edit" menu of Microsoft applications. It does not just pull up any page that has the keyword in it X number of times. If it did, all pages that show up on search engine results would simply contain a list of the keywords.
Ultimately, writing for the search engines means writing for web surfers. Think about it: services like Google thrive on giving people the pages they want to read. If they consistently failed to give people what they wanted, people would stop using them.
What Your Website's Visitors Want to Read
Most of the time, people don't want to read on the web. Reading on a screen hurts the eyes. It doesn't help that a lot of web pages make it harder with text that's too small, backgrounds that are colored rather than white, and lots of extraneous graphics.
Besides, when it comes to reading matter, there is an overabundance of choice on the web, more than any library on earth. Of that, an unfortunate amount isn't worth reading. Time must be rationed.
In fact, people treat a web page much as a search engine does: they scan it. In particular, they scan it for the keywords they entered into the search engine. If they arrived via a link from another website, they are still looking for words and phrases related to their interest--which are generally the same as the keywords people enter into search engines.
In short, Nobel-prize-winning literature makes bad web content. You have to write specifically for the web. That's why the web hasn't fueled much of a resurgence in the short story or other literary writing, dashing many hopes. Ebook versions of paper books have also disappointed expectations.
Newspapers are the only paper publications that have made a smooth online transition, precisely because they are written in short, to-the-point paragraphs that are easy to scan.
Still Think Good SEO Web Content Makes for Bad Reading?
You've just read almost to the end of a piece of search-engine-optimized web content. This article was optimized for the keywords, "SEO," "search engine," "search engines," "keyword," "keywords," "search engine optimization," and "writing."
The keywords were present in headings and throughout the content. The content itself is easy to scan: paragraphs of one-three sentences, broken up by sub-headings every four paragraphs or so.
Naturally, those keywords are too broad for this page to have a chance of ranking high in search engines for them. But this page will get some of the atypical search keywords that account for as many as half of all searches. So, if someone types in a phrase like, "keyword writing search engine optimized content," this page would have a pretty good chance of showing up.
To be sure, this article is on the long side for a web page. Most people won't even scan more than 600 words of text; 250-500 is ideal.
But this article is destined primarily to be shown in an email newsletter, where attention spans are longer since people are more confident the source of the content can be trusted to repay their investment of time. Besides, as a well-structured page, it can be split into two or three pages according to the subheadings.
In short, there's much more to writing well for the web than just writing well. If you've had enough sense to have your web content written professionally, have enough sense to take the advice of most website copywriters: search-engine-optimization for keywords and good web writing are the same thing.