Achieve High Rankings for your Web Pages

By David Lakins, Managing Director of Key Multimedia

The web pages listed at the top of Google’s search results tend to have one thing in common - good writing.

Picking up the theme of structuring content for your website in order to improve the opportunity to sell I discussed in the last newsletters I was recently struck by the fact that the web pages that rank highly on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what is available on the web.

Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise, considering that the Google Webmaster Help Centre proclaims the importance of good content.

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
  
  
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
  
  
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler that will be visiting your pages doesn't recognize text contained in images.

Most common web page content success features

There are bound to be technical reasons why certain web pages appear higher than other – but Google appears to be doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings.

Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffic delivered by Google.

Most of the regular top five listed web pages that contain written content all tend to share the following features:

Regularly updated content: Content that is updated at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.

Spelling and grammar: Few or no errors. Does Google use a Spell Check? Keep in mind that no one really does know what the factors in Google's algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is Spell Check or another mechanism to check the credibility of a page, 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 strung together.

Contextual relevance: Text contains numerous terms related to the keyword (or theme of the page), as well as stem variations of the keyword.

So what can we learn from Google?

Take a leaf out of Google’s Webmaster Tips and take your content writing seriously. If you can, make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is helping you create your page content.

If you write your own content, make sure that someone else at least proof-reads it in order to check for spelling and grammatical errors before going online.

Update your content often. It's important both to add new pages and update existing pages.