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.

This is a guest post by Vikas Rawat.

When you start browsing internet to find search engine optimization (SEO) tips that will help you outrank your competitors in search engine rankings, you will end up seeing hundreds of tips and may even make you confused about which way out to use and which one to miss.

If you are in the same situation, don’t worry I’m going to help you. I have compiled a list of SEO tips that really works as we had seen these tips been helping our own as well as client websites get good rankings in all major search engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing.

So here is the list of 7 SEO tips one should consider for better search engine visibility for their websites and blogs:

1. Content Quality

“Content is King” is an old saying when we talks about promoting a website in search engines. Today’s saying is “Quality Content is King” after “panda update” algorithm change from Google.

We should be writing well-researched contents whether we are using it on our website, blogs, and article directories or as guest post on other popular blogs in our niche. Today’s web trend is more towards quality than quantity. It’s good to write one well researched content when 2-3 non-informative contents.

2. Content Usage

Gone are the days when we used to keep on sharing the same content on hundreds of web portals. Today’s trend is using a single content on as few websites as possible. Suppose you have a written an article on your website or a guest post on a popular blog in your niche, you should not be using it nowhere.

Few months back, lots of SEO’s and link builders used to submit the same article on 100′s of article directories. That trend has changed today and now the ideal approach will be using your content on 4 to 5 most popular article publishing websites only if you are thinking of using article marketing strategy to promote your website.

3. Keyword Rich URL’s

When calculating ranking for a website, Google takes into consideration its URL as one of rankings factor.

Suppose you have got two URL’s that you want to target for link building: http://www.seobricks.com/services/link-building and http://www.seobricks.com/services/seo.

Which one you think Google will give higher preference. Definitely, Google will give higher preference to first URL as it contains the targeted keyword in its URL.

4. Content Formatting

We should be using bolds, italics, strong, list types etc to make your content more appealing to your website readers and search engines. When we have added bold etc to some of key terms on a page, search engines will give extra weight-age to those keywords, but don’t overdo it.

5. Contextual Links Matters

Google has become smarter in differentiating between quality and spam links. Google seems to be giving more weight-age to contextual links compared to other form of backlinking patterns.

Links from websites footer section, sidebars or blogrolls and directories does not have the kind of importance they were having before panda update. You can get maximum benefit of a link if it’s coming from other blogs in your niche naturally or as a result of your guest post, blog commenting, article submissions, PR submissions etc.

6. Interlink Your Website Contents

We generally talk a lot about things like adding quality content, getting links from popular websites and presence on social media websites for better search engine rankings. But we forget the importance of interlinking of contents for better page rank, search engine rankings and visitors engagement.

We should interlink our website contents where they are adding values for our website readers. But don’t overdo it otherwise it will look spammy and your website readers will also face problems in reading your website contents.

7. Anchor Text Diversity

When generating links for your website from various websites, you should make sure that you are not using the same anchor text over and over. You should do some variations with your anchors to make them look natural. And if you end up getting thousands of links using the same anchor text, may face some penalty from search engines.

You will be able to add lots of organic traffic to your website using the SEO tips mentioned above. Do you think I missed some important SEO tips that I should have mentioned here, please share in the comments section below.

Vikas has been writing contents for Sebricks.com, an Indian SEO Consultant firm popularly known for their SEO and link building services in India and overseas.