Joe Walsh conducted an interesting experiment investigating the top website results for the most searched for keywords. His results were surprising because they went against many of the standard good practice assumptions regarding search engine optimisation, including:
- PageRank did not play as important as you would think it should have.
- Link bleeding (many outgoing links) was present and obviously did not hinder these sites placing high in the results.
- There were javascript internal links which are generally considered a no-no because Google won’t/can’t follow them.
- Keyword optimisation didn’t impact the results very significantly, some of the pages didn’t even contain the keyword!
Search Engine Journal: I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing. Does Google, the world’s wealthiest media company, really rank web pages based primarily on arcane technical criteria such as keyword density, link text, or even PageRank? Apparently not.
[ Full Article ]
His conclusion was that well written content is the key factor determining good results. Obviously I’m inclined to believe that most of the sites had a lot of incoming links using the appropriate keywords in the linking text, but it once again proves that good content that is well written is the key to a successful website. By well written I mean content that has no spelling or grammar issues, bullet point lists and short concise paragraphs - all the things you might learn about writing at journalism school.
The best writers conform to set standards so it’s reasonable to expect that these standards are coded into the Google algorithm and used to rank sites. As I mentioned previously, Google has probably the best dictionary in the world because it can compare words to its entire index of the web. It is going to know if you are misspelling words. You don’t have to be perfect, but keep your standards high.
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While I agree that good content is definately the most important factor for a website - I have a few problems with this article.
OK the most obvious one is he does not address inbound links at all, and that is by far the most important SEO factor for any given website. Also a lot of this info is provided without context - for example the site ranked number one with a page rank of zero - how competitive was that keyword? That makes a huge difference.(also ignoring the fact that the pr displayed in the toolbar is not neccessarily an accurate indicator).
I guess the most annoying thing about this article is the obviousness of its major premise. Of course good content is the major factor in determining google rank - they’ve been quite explicit about that from the start.
It just annoys me when people are seemingly trying to make out that typical SEO activities are a waste of time - in my mind there is copious evidence that they aren’t (the rankings for our website being the most obvious). While it isn’t the most predictable or easy of marketing activities, if done in the right way it is more than worthwhile.
I agree with everything you said Ed and while reading the article I certainly felt like I was missing a lot of information to explain the context of the search and results used in the article.
However what I liked about the article and why I mentioned it was because it talked about content being the number one factor to worry about, that it has to be good content AND quantified particular things that are present in good content.
For someone running a home based solo Internet business that is handling all the SEO themselves and may not have time or motivation to study the intricacies of SEO or the funds to pay someone to handle it for them, focusing on generating good content is the one thing that is easy to do, is non-technical and will be effective over time. You keep writing interesting stuff that other humans are interested in.
The nature of SEO is very ambiguous because you have to at times guess what Google likes and dislikes and still the results can be completely random. Sometimes all you can do is scratch your head and wonder how that happened.
If you write a good article and lots of people link to it and read it there is a clear reason why that worked - you appealed to humans, not search engines, which in the end will appeal to search engines anyway since search engines are meant to find the best human answers to human questions.
A question for you Ed - if someone only had time to work on one aspect of SEO - what would you recommend they focus on for the best results?
Interesting…I agree with Edward in respect to ommissions from the article - reading between the lines it appears that there is no magic number of words (certainly no mention of the often cited 300-500 words). I know many pages on my primary site get very good SERPS buy often only have 100-250 words.
It does however raise a conundrum, and possibly answers a nagging issue in my own mind - that is of spelling mistakes. I have a site that is optimised for a misspelling of a particular word. I did this because 32% of the population spells it this way and I was happy to have them as my customers.
So, does this new spelling aspect destroy this niching strategy? It could be, looking at stats over the past 18 months and resulting business.
Hmm…good point PlusOne or should I call you Matt
I’ve certainly read discussions about chasing common misspellings and taking into account regional variances like optimisation vs optimization.
It sucks when one search engine has so much power, or should I say it sucks when so many people come online to compete with you that you can’t simply be “out there” and get easy traffic from the search engine.