How To Build Quality Content

[djbaxter]

How To Build Quality Content
by Duane Forrester, Bing Community
August 2, 2011

Building quality content is far more than simply building content. And how do we measure ?quality?? In this post we?ll examine some of the factors often attributed to ?quality? content, explain why you want to include them and help explain how the measurement of ?quality? happens, though it may not be what you expect...

Quality content ? says who?
There are two main measures for good content. First is the user. Does the user feel the content you?ve produced is of high quality? Are users engaging with the content? While the answer may seem as simple as ?Yes, they come to my site. I get lots of visitors?, be careful you?re not missing telltale signs of the quality being not quite what you think. If your visitors are staying on your website for only a few seconds, are they actually able to consume the content you have in that short period of time? While it may feel like you?ve poured your heart and soul into creating the content on the website, quality is in the eye of the visitor, and short page dwell times can indicate the content is not capturing the visitor?s interest. Something about the content is not grabbing their attention.

The second measure is the search engines themselves. While the crawlers from the engines qualify as visitors in the above scenario, the crawlers will, in most cases, consume all the content they can find. The engines can be used to give hints to the quality of your content. If you?ve done everything you can to get pages indexed and still the engines won?t take the pages in, that?s an indication the quality of the pages may be low. In this example, the quality we?re referring to isn?t necessarily the look and feel of the page. The page may look great and offer all kinds of interactivity, but the actual content itself isn?t making the cut. This can happen with highly dynamic websites which use content from other sources. Ecommerce sites can be affected by this, using common product descriptions which appear everywhere across the Internet. Essentially it?s a lack of unique content that signals low quality.

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[VRS]

Sometimes it's not just the quality of the content either, but it's appearance. The way people look for information these days they want to be able to digest it as soon as possible.

So first they'll scan your content real fast to see if there's anything relevant to what interests them. That's why good headlines and sub-headlines are good to include in your articles. Plus, bullet points or a numbered list can help. These draw the reader in if what you're highlighting is compelling enough to grab their attention and draw them in to your content. Believe it or not the search engines even like theses structures in your content as well. So it's a win for everyone - you, your reader, and the search engines.

(Of course you need to write interesting content too)

 

[EmilyParkinson]

I like to write content for my websites on my own - I've outsourced it before, but the quality of the content is usually lower. I always do keyword research before writing any content - I target 1/2 main keywords per article and also research LSI keywords, I think this helps as well.