When you’re trying to find a little bit of valuable knowledge about Internet marketing, you’ll come across the term “good content” one way or another. But what is good content? And how do you know that the content on your site is good content?
There are several basic criteria by which you can assess the quality of materials on your site (blog). In this article, we’re going to look at how to conduct a comprehensive check of your existing materials against the criteria for quality content.
Uniqueness
The first requirement that your content within your site must meet is uniqueness. And this does not mean that you need to replace all the usual words on their pre-revolutionary counterparts, or try to describe in other language the procedure for selecting, say, winter tires for the car. This kind of uniqueness is sure not to play into your hands.
We can conventionally divide uniqueness into two types:
- Absolute (uniqueness on the Internet).
- To determine the uniqueness of the text, you can use online services such as Content Watch or Advego.
- The desired rate of uniqueness is between 80 and 100 percent.
- Relative (uniqueness within the site).
- The uniqueness of content, as well as the content of meta tags within the site is one of the most important factors of search engine optimization. It will largely depend on the ranking of pages in search results.
To analyze a site for duplicate content within a site, you will need Google Search Console and a crawler, which I will use Netpeak Spider as my crawler. GSC will notify you of any duplicate pages within the site as they appear. Netpeak Spider will help you control duplicate content in real time. The program will allow you to find:
- complete duplicate pages,
- duplicate text content in the <body> tag,
- duplicate H1 titles and Title and Description meta tags.
Spelling and lexical literacy
User opinion about your professionalism will be formed under the influence of several factors, and one of them may be your literacy (or illiteracy) – spelling, syntax and lexical. If you can’t afford to get help from a professional editor, who will remove all unnecessary things from your text and correct all mistakes, use Glavred or TEXT.RU.
By the way, if you also work with English-language materials, I recommend using the Grammarly service.
Structuring the text
Structuring your information with titles, numbered and bulleted lists not only makes the text visually more appealing, but also easier for the user to understand. In addition, based on numerous studies, H1 and H2 headings play a significant role in SEO and are taken into account by search engines.
If your site has only a few dozen pages of text content, checking it out does not threaten to turn into a real nightmare of a few weeks. However, if the site has thousands of pages of content, it is better to use an automated solution. The aforementioned crawler can be used as such a solution.
To check the presence of headings of any order, search for duplicate headings, as well as too long H1 (more than 65 characters by default), you should act according to the following algorithm:
- Start Netpeak Spider.
- Open the Options tab on the sidebar.
- Go to “Content” → “H1-H6 Headings”. Check the items “H1 Content, H1 Headers” and “H2 Headers”. If the main content of the site is complex and voluminous material that should be structured with lower-order headings (H3-H6), check the appropriate items for analysis as well.
In the Initial URL field, enter the site address.
If you are interested in analyzing all pages of the site, you should simply enter the domain. If you want to scan, for example, only blog pages (both section and pages within it begin the same – say, website.com/blog), enter the section address into the search bar, and then under “Settings” → “General” enable the “Scan only within section” option.
Click “Start” to start the scan.
When the scan finishes, you will see a table with the following results:
In the columns corresponding to the selected headers (the ones you checked in “Preferences”), you will see their number on each page of the site (or on all pages of the section), as well as the H1 length data.
Ideally, each page should have one H1 header (no more than 65 characters in length on average) and several H2 headers. The total number of headings of one order or another is irrelevant from an SEO perspective, but plays a significant role in structuring content, as we wrote above.
After sorting out the header data in the main table, go to the sidebar. There, under “Reports” → “Errors”, you will see a summary of errors, in particular errors associated with H1 headers.
By clicking on the name of the error you are interested in, you will filter the results and see an additional tab that summarizes only those pages where the error is present.
The amount of text and meta tag content
As good as those three sentences you fill in the blank in the middle of the page are, they remain just three sentences. Although quality is valued over quantity, the latter is still important for optimizing content within a site. This applies to both the main content within the tag and the Title and Description meta tags.
To check the volume of content (and its presence as such), I’ll use the aforementioned Netpeak Spider. However, before describing the validation sequence, let’s go over the recommended content volume and content length meta tags:
- Main content: at least 500 characters.
- If you are running a content project and all of your content should be somewhat long, you can set a minimum length for this in Preferences → Restrictions.
- Title: at least 10 and no more than 50-70 characters on average.
- Description: for the main page – 50 to 230 characters on average, for all other pages – 50 to 320 characters.
Check as follows:
- Run Netpeak Spider.
- Enter the address of the site in the “start URL”.
- On the sidebar open the “Options” tab. Under “Head Tags” select the first four parameters, in the “Indicators” check the “Content Size” (the amount of text in the block <body> with spaces) and “Number of characters” (the amount of text in the block <body> without spaces).
Click “Start” to start scanning.
At the end of the scan, a table will collect data for each of the analyzed indicators, and the tab “Reports” → “Errors” will summarize the problems associated with too little or too much volume.
Keywords
Sometimes even the coolest expert article that meets a very topical need of the audience may end up somewhere in the tail of search results. Hence the need to run through semantics properly and use text analytics services to improve your material for organic keyword rankings.
Inbound and outbound links
When adding the next incredibly useful and engaging piece of content to your site, don’t forget to make sure it gets found. If the content is not found by users and search engine robots, its value will tend to zero. What can you do to remedy the situation? The answer is simple: leave links to your content in the right places, viz:
- in the block with the latest entries on the home page;
- In the “similar posts” blocks below other posts;
- in the block with the pinned posts (visually highlighted block on the home page, slider);
- in the block with the “latest posts”;
- in the text of thematically related materials.
Now you probably know what you’re going to do with new publications in the future, but don’t forget about the materials you’ve managed to produce in the past. To find out which pages you have no incoming (from other pages) and outgoing (to other pages) links, reopen the crawler window and do some simple maneuvers:
- Go to the settings section of the program and check the options, as shown in the image below.
- In “Parameters” on the sidebar, select the template with the minimum set of parameters. Activate the parameters related to the “Links” item.
- Enter the site address in the Initial URL field and start scanning.
If at the end of the scan you will find pages which have no internal links, or which do not have any internal links, Netpeak Spider will mark them as error pages. In the first case the error “PageRank: no outgoing links” will appear, in the second – “PageRank: no links”.
Images and videos
Many users who are tired of the endless stream of information, which flows every second literally from everywhere.
For those who work with content, it means only one thing: all your posts should have pictures. Photos, screenshots, infographics, gifs, and videos all make the content more attractive and “reader-friendly. If your content is educational, pictures and videos make the material more visual and informative, revealing all the things that are difficult to show in text.
To check if all content pages on your site have images, scan the site with a crawler. The procedure is similar to the previous ones, the only difference being that the only parameter you need in this case is “Images” (the “Content” item).
Briefly about the main things
Content quality and optimization play an important role both for its potential readers and for search engines, which strive to show content that will best meet users’ needs. There are several main aspects of content optimization in terms of quality, ease of perception, and compliance with search engine requirements:
- uniqueness,
- orthographic and lexical literacy,
- text structuring,
- the volume of text and the content of meta tags,
- keywords,
- incoming and outgoing links,
- images and videos.
You can check and optimize content for each of these points using various online services.