What is High Quality Content?

We always hear that content is king" and you should provide readers high quality content.

But what is high quality content?

Is it more than the "I will know it when I see it?" definition?

Trying to define what is quality is almost impossible. I searched here on Wealthy Affiliate as well as Google. I found that:

• Quality is subjective.
• Quality content is like the search for the Holy Grail.
• No one (that I found) has a definition of quality content.

Even Google is vague about defining quality. And they are the ones evaluating our websites and content for ranking within Search Engine Results Pages (SERP)!

From the Google Webmaster Guidelines, the basic guidelines are:

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Don't deceive your users.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Then the Google Webmaster Guidelines go on and list things to avoid such as automatically generated content, creating pages with little or no original content, etc.

So we have more definitions for what is NOT quality content than what is quality content.

The best definitions I found tried defining quality content in measurable elements that appear to correlate to quality. These elements relate to your readers' experience (user experience) and impact quality.

1. Writing in-depth articles - Google SERP rankings favor long posts over short ones. But are we writing for SEO rankings or for the user? If you are going to write short posts/articles, then you probably do not want to rely on Google for your traffic.

2. Avoiding grammatical and spelling errors - makes sense. Spelling and typos detract from the content.

3. No broken links - probably impact SEO results more than the user experience. but if you want your visitor to leave to go to an product or order page or other content, the links should work.

4. Page load speeds - test your webpages with applications like http://www.webpagetest.org/ and http://gtmetrix.com. Doing your own "eyeball" test is not a good indicator because we all use different IPS's, browsers, and equipment.

5. Advertising - Excessive number of ads detract from the user experience. It is most annoying when the page content does not load quickly because the ad farm servers take too long loading ads to the page.

So, what do we do now?

The best way to consider the quality of content is to view it from the perspective of the reader. Consider these factors:

• Does the content provide complete, relevent information to the reader?
• Does it answer the question(s) the reader had when he arrived on your website?
• Does the content engage the reader, or did the reader immediately leave?
• Does the content provide a better user experience than your competitors?
• Does the content display a level of expertise in the subject?

Hope this helps.

Glen