Look at any search engine optimisation or web marketing guide, and they’ll all tell you that you need great content before you do anything else. So, what makes great content? Turns out there are two ways to make great content – Google’s way, and the visitor’s way. The two SEO tactics overlap more than you’d think, though.

Great content: Visitor’s view

Visitors like website content that is:

  • Easy to read
  • Easy to understand
  • Short and succinct
  • Bulleted (!)
  • Regularly updated
  • Focused on a single topic
  • Explains benefits, not just features
  • Focuses on THEIR interaction with the product, not the company’s

Your visitors will also appreciate content that includes your keywords – after all, they are usually what brought them to your site, and it’s nice to have that validation of knowing that the page is about what you expected.

However, visitors generally DISlike keyword stuffed content.

Great content: Google’s view

Google likes content to:

  • Include keywords
  • Not include too many keywords!
  • Be regularly updated
  • Be unique – not copied from another site
  • Be fairly well-focused – one concept or product per page

You can see that both Google, and your visitors, dislike keyword stuffing. Both of them like to see fresh content (it tells them the site is current), and each likes the content to be fairly tightly focused. And the rest of the points are definitely not mutually exclusive!