Content is King, Queen and the Joker in the Deck

You can find the "content is king" quote all over the Web in articles about SEO simply because it's true. As Google and the other engines have evolved, they have become much more effective in gleaning the meaning of page content, how it relates to the overall site subject matter, and how visitors perceive its value.

How does Google know what visitors think about your content? If you're using Google Analytics, which is a great way for you to know what your visitors are doing on your site, Google definitely knows how long they stay on a page and where they go from there. If they stay on a page a while, then the assumption is that content of value is there and visitors are reading it. If they take links from that page to other pages on your site, the assumption is that you're helping the visitor learn more about what they came there to see.

Even if you're not using Analytics, you can bet that Google knows what they're doing anyway after they arrive from a Google search. Google's algorithms are highly secret and very complex, but we do know that Google is learning a lot about individual user preferences and Web activities and applying that knowledge to large groups of users based on common destinations and surfing activities.

The more complex the algorithms and analytics measurements, the more detailed the profile of your site and content. It's no longer about packing keywords into a page over and over again. In fact, you'll get penalized very quickly for "keyword stuffing" these days. Google has made giant leaps in understanding what constitutes valuable content for the site visitor. One of the newer and very powerful content analysis tools used by Google is LSI, Latent Semantic Indexing.

Latent Semantic Indexing

Words don't stand alone. They are related to each other in various ways, and Google is using LSI to build a massive database of related words and phrases. To understand this better, in real estate an example on a website might be an article about title insurance. Google would be relating "title insurance" to other phrases like:

• Title commitment
• Title binder
• Title binder exceptions
• Title commitment requirements
• Property insurance

There will be more than those few examples, but you're getting the picture. What we need to understand about this concept is that these related phrases will be used in the context of a page to rank it based on their related topic. You may be writing an article about title insurance, but you'll get SEO credit on that page for using LSI-relevant words and phrases. You no longer have to keep repeating the same key phrase over and over.

This relates to your goals in that you want your visitors to have a pleasant reading experience, and they're not search engine robots. Those repetitive keywords and phrases are more a nuisance than a help to the site visitor. Now you and Google are aligned in your goal for the page. You both want the visitor to have a good reading experience and to learn more related to the search that brought them there.

Content, content, content

Create articles about real estate in general and real estate in your market area. Rather than long unfocused articles, create more articles with each focused on a specific key phrase, such as breaking out the title insurance education into articles on "YourMarket Title Insurance, What it Covers and What it Doesn't," "YourTown Title Insurance Binder Requirements," and "YourArea Title Insurance Commitment Exceptions" will give you three focused topics that will climb in search engine results.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.