Content? What about it..?

What do SE's love about content..?

[JamaicanFood]

Hi guys,

i am in the process of completing content writing and I wanted to make sure I was doing the right thing here.

We are aiming for about 350 articles on a site but can you tell me exactly what do SE's love about content.

I have tried to ensure that every article is at least 1000 words with a keyword density of about 7-10%.

Now is 1000 words enough to be rated by the SE's. Its not that I cant offer more info etc but I just wanted to know if each page could be an epistle or just a synopsis.

As long as its interesting & informative to the reader then I am cool but what are the SE's looking for in the content to actually rate it. This means if I was to rebuild my site and actually include 2000 words per page then would I rank higher in the SE.

All other things being equal(links, etc)

If you can tell me what these are it would be a great guide in my writers misson going forward.

Your thoughts.

[hunderdown]

I don't think the number of words total matters much--and 1,000 words seems like more than enough to me. I often post articles that are considerably shorter than that.

[stapel]

I don't know that it's "number of words" as much as "chunkiness of content" that makes your site interesting to the search engines. That is, a thousand "fluff" words (that nobody links to or views because nobody cares) wouldn't be as "valuable" as four hundred words of solid content (that people love, refer to, e-mail each other about, and link to).

For instance, I try not to make my articles terribly long, because length can depress my users: I write algebra lessons, and they already "hate" algebra, so they don't want to see a huge document full of even more of what they hate. But my articles are, apparently, fairly useful, judging from the traffic, reviews, and in-links. I only have about a hundred lessons spread over about three hundred pages. But if you Google "algebra", my site will likely be on the first page of hits. This isn't due to the volume of my writing or my search-engine optimization; indeed, my SEO pretty much amounts to having changed my site format away from framesets some years ago. My ranking is the result of having created useful and easily-accessed content, doing a small amount of outreach (to get the initial in-links), and then sitting back and waiting.

Search engines often rate your site's "value" according to the number of sites linking to you, with those in-links weighted by the "value" of the in-linking sites. (This is why link-farms don't work in the long term.) So making yourself "tasty" to search engines boils down to "content, content, content".

And waiting; don't forget the waiting. ;-)

Eliz.