Things to Think About When Creating Good Content

Everyone knows how important content is to a website. Search engines use it to help decide what your website is about. Customers will form opinions about your company from the content you have on the website. Content can get links. Great content can get great links. So with the importance of content ringing in my ears I have decided to get some thoughts down and outline some ideas for creating great content.

If you want to take these ideas away in not form I have placed them on this slide for convenience. The post will explain the points listed here.

How to Utilise the Title

Chenry over at the Youmoz section of SEOmoz.org recently posted a great article studying the factors that make post link worthy. Although this was based on blog posts, and the subject matter being SEO based, there is still a lot that can be applied to general content.

The results show that posts with titles 10-18 words in length receive the most links. They are long enough to explain what the post is about and entice people in, but not too long that they scare people away.

Another thing to bear in mind is using your keywords in the Title of the content/post. If people do decide to link to you they will often use the title of the post as the anchor text. So keep the title relevant and informative.

How Long Should the Post Be?

Again Chenry’s post also looks at the length of the posts that get the most links. Contrary to popular belief he discovered that up until about the 2700 word mark, the more words you have on the post the more likely it is going to be linked to. Longer articles will often come across as more authoritative and in-depth which can lead to links. Remember again this is for the SEO niche and will not always be the case in each specific industry. Do some research into the authority sites in your vertical and see who is ranking well and getting links. What are they doing? Are they providing quick snippets? Do they create long informative documents? Each industry will have different needs for content and matching these is vital.

Outbound links can help your readers.

It’s very underplayed as far as ranking factors go but I believe who you link to is important in the eyes of the search engines. Search engines want to provide the most relevant results and they also want customers to find what they are looking for quickly. Making sure you don’t link out to spammy sites or bad neighbourhoods goes without saying, but if your link out in your article to relevant and useful websites then I believe the search engines will see your content as informative and helpful. Remember they want to be providing searchers with information not adverts, so linking out to good content helps reassure the SE’s you want to help, not sell.

Try to remember this when writing your content, if your recommend a product, put a link to it. If you talking about a subject you think a customer might want to read more about, place a link.

Text to Code ratio

One of the factors most search engines take into account when ranking is the text to code ratio. Generally the higher text to code ratio the better. This of course means that the amount of content will vary from site to site depending on the code you are using. There is a handy tool to check this for you over at seochat.

There are a couple of ways to approach this if you have a lot of code on your website. The obvious one would be to add more content on/make posts longer etc. If this is something you can’t or don’t want to do for various reasons, another way of improving the ratio is to look at compressing/tidying up the code on your website. Not only will this have the effect of reducing the amount of code, but it will also help to speed up loading times and improve performance of your website. This is going to become more important for ranking well in the future as Google strives to improve user experience. Justin March has this covered on his post on page speed, and it’s also covered by Search Engine Land. In an effort to help webmasters Google has released a page speed tool for firefox available here.

Contain media / images

A potential downside of increasing the length of content, is that people may get bored or not have enough time to read through it all. Including media doesn’t just increase the amount of links you are likely to get; it also keeps focus on the topic while switching the media it’s displayed in. It can also be a way of getting a quick understanding of the topic if the reader is rushed

So when putting your content together, look for ways of including relevant and useful media, your readers will like it and will hopefully link to it (see below )

Feel free to print off the slide for use with your content, if you reuse it please reference this website.

Did you know that when you link to one of my posts I aim to provide a search engine friendly, contextual link back to your website where possible? Also after a couple of relevant comments your links will be approved as dofollowed. Why wait to get involved?