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Google's Good Writing Content Filter
Published: July 28, 2005
Reading all about Google's good writing content filter helped reinforce what I've been investigating lately. I've recently been looking at various ways of 'converting traffic', not just 'receiving traffic'. This is all about making sure the people that visit the site are the right kind of people, that is 'buyers' not 'browsers' and some form of transaction or correspondence occurs or at least an increase on existing statistics.
This is always going to be incredibly hard to do. It is for anyone in any industry but a few simple golden rules always make you stand out from the competition and increase your odds of 'converting' your visitors.
The internet, more than anything, requires trust. If you wish to get a customer to hand over money for your products or services, they have to trust you. The problem is an inherent one, you are your website and that's all there is standing in the way. This is why cheap websites are such a false economy that it's anyones guess why they still represent someones business.
Now, these few simple golden rules. A lot of them seem like common sense but often design forces alternative arrangements which is an unfortunate and costly sacrifice. The point of a website is it's marketing power and customer interaction, not to look good on the designers portfolio list.
Good quality content
Good quality content is all about being verbose about your products or services, being clear about its presentation and ultimately being correct in terms of the accuracy of its spelling and grammar.
Information must be conveyed and marked up correctly. Paragraphs need to be summarised and well organised, items that need listing must be listed. This makes the information more digestable.
The aim is to serve the information to a user in a clear and effective way. The previous problem of simple SEO techniques is that you need a good dose of keywords in the page and a focus needs to be created. It appears as though the new Google good writing content filter will start to reward informative, accurate and clearly marked up sites. Sadly, you'll never get away with having to keyword stuff to some degree but knowing Google, it will rely more on links than keyword focus.
The benefits of good quality content are that people on the site are further impressed and inspired to buy from you. Great. But it never served well in terms of rank so you're always going to struggle to get the visitors in. This is where the new content filter should turn things around and we'll see the best of both worlds.
Writing concise and accurate TITLE tags
Just the opposite of being verbose, is being concise with your titles. These are the short few words that appear across the top of your browser. Keeping a focus here will ensure search engines will better identify the page and deliver the right page to the user when searching.
Finally
If ever there was reason to ensure you get professional editorial services provided for your website, it's now. Sites must be proof read, edited, accurate, articulate and informative.
Quite how a piece of software determines this boggles the mind but results speak for themselves. Good content consistently gets good listings.
Maybe one day, Google will measure a website in terms of its quality and not on the SEO's linking strategy and marketing campaign.