High quality content

Content is one of the 'big topics' in SEO best practice at the moment. Without useful, timely and interesting content, a site will not rank highly in search engine results, meaning that even if the website meets the technical SEO factors, visitors will not come to the site.

Good content will also increase the chance of relevant websites linking to your content. Relevant links between relevant websites further strengthen the performance of individual pages and the overall website.

Webpages need to be well-written and high quality so that users are encouraged to stay on the site, share the content socially and convert. The quality of the content can be enhanced by restricting text written for marketing purposes to appropriate places and making sure that content elsewhere is informative and appropriate to the audiences that will visit the site.

Keep it fresh

Both search engines and users will appreciate ‘fresh’ content that is updated often. Search engines will place more authority on a blog that is updated often because they will see it as a useful source of information.

Timeliness of information is important. If the website content is reflecting market events, such as natural disasters or latest laws, then the website will be considered an informative source of information.

Write for users

Content should be written based on the language that users are using, so acronyms and jargon should be minimised if the audience doesn’t understand it. Pages that are written for users will naturally lead to a blend of alternative keywords.

Pages should also reflect what a user wants when they visit. For example, on an event page, users will want to see when the event is and how much it is. They may be less interested in the facilities of the hotel – this is suitable just as a link if they need it. Pages should be limited to one or two topics, rather than a big list of topics (which is a common problem with FAQ pages).

Pages on a single topic will be shorter, making it easier to read for users, and more authority can be placed on fewer keywords which should improve search performance and ensure that users end up on the correct page.

In a similar vein, paragraph size should be limited so users aren’t fatigued reading page content. These factors will also have a positive effect on the accessibility and user experience of a website. The content has been written appropriately for audiences.

Call to actions

Once a user has visited your page and consumed the information, the availability of call to actions are the difference between the user staying and hopefully converting or just leaving immediately. A website with a small amount of call to actions that are well worded and relevant are much more useful than a page that has lots of irrelevant call to actions that can hide the one the user wants.

Don't over duplicate

Google may penalise sites that have too much duplicate content, as it considers this 'gaming the search rankings'. Even if this is unintentional, the site may get penalised. This is one of the reasons we are starting to remove mirrored course page content into school pages, and we urge schools to review their own content to remove duplicates.