Google's advice for your website: Content

Google Advice
The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don't get so caught up in the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, that you forget your site's content.

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 is read on the web.

Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise, considering how often officials at Google proclaim the importance of good content. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing.
Does Google, the world's wealthiest media company, really ignore traditional standards of quality in the publishing world? Does Google, like so many website owners, really get so caught up in the process of the algorithm that it misses the whole point? Apparently not.


Most common on-page website content success features

Updating: Frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.

Spelling and grammar: Few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors.

Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word's check feature, and then ruling out words marked as mis-spellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? Keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google's algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same.

Paragraphs: Primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.

Lists: Both bulleted and numbered form a large part of the text.

Sentence length: Mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together.

Contextual relevance: Text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword.