I am sure everyone is fed up with words like ‘Content is King’. What is after all good content? Is good content good for your search ranking?
These are questions which lurk around at the back of our mind, but most of us tend to ignore the underlying issue. The content conundrum has many dimensions. Here I wish to look at content from Google’s search engine perspective.
Google crawler doesn’t have brain
Or does it?
Howsoever much Google tries to put intelligence into its search crawler it’s still a long way away from real brains. Google crawler or Robot or Bot is a software code which crawls through websites and gathers information for indexing purposes.
The process essentially consists of discovering keywords or key phrases, understanding the structure and layout of a website and using a proprietary algorithm, it then decides on the quality.
For example, if the keyword density is over 2 – 3 % it decides that the site is stuffed with keywords. Why choose 2 – 3 % density, why not 10 %? This is because Google has researched human writing habits and found that 2 – 3 % is the average keyword density.
Google algo also looks at consistency on web pages. For example, if the title is ‘How to purchase a pair of good hiking shoes?’, but the content does not have a word of hiking shoes mentioned, it smells a rat.
If your website is consistent throughout, with similar tags, headings and content, Google concludes that the website is genuine and ranks it accordingly.
You would notice that good content in the context of Google search is different. It’s not some thesis or research paper which makes content good or bad. It is keywords and consistency.
Why backlinks are important?
The second plank of Google algorithm is backlinks. Backlinks decide how popular your website is with others. Here the quality of backlinks is critical.
If you make friends with bad guys, you will be punished. Your website is known by the backlinks it keeps. You must make sure that the backlinks are genuine and not some backlinks factory doing some shady work.
This seems to be a no-brainer but many of us seem to forget this important aspect.
Google algorithm has hundreds of other criteria to rank a website, but it still doesn’t make it intelligent. The trick is to design a website without bothering about search engine optimization.
The beauty of such an approach is that you will automatically align yourself with Google requirements.
How much of content is enough?
Like every human being, Google algo likes to dig into a fat chunk of content. Google likes lots and lots of content in a website. A hundred pages of content would be par for the course. I have not done any specific research but it’s my gut feeling.
Conclusion
Good content in the context of Google search takes on a completely different meaning. Maybe we should say that keyword is king rather than content.
And Google search algorithm doesn’t have brains.
Victor Solovey is the owner of crazyxhtml , where they do crazy stuff including “psd to html” and “psd to css” conversion. Victor is passionate about his work and also likes to write.
