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Quality And The Need For Quality SEO

Why is quality so important? Why do most people strive to improve quality? You may think these are easy questions to answer but the level of discussion that goes on around quality SEO is huge.

Quality SEO is important and there are many reasons but these are some key topics that I seen around the internet at the moment and wanted to comment on;

How does a search engine differentiate between quality and spam?

I have seen examples of websites that if you described to someone they would say that's a spam site, but in reality it's a really useful site with a good ethical objective. So how does a search engine know the difference? The answer is the search engines are really smart and can pick up on trends and information you wouldn't think about. What they use and exactly how they use it is not 100% clear but it is clear they use the information they have to find the answers and the do sometimes get it wrong!

Why are the search engines obsessed with quality?

This is easy; they want the users to get the best experience from using their engine as possible. The less spam and useless content the better. We have to remember that a search engine is built to find and display useful content (primarily) not to find and display services or products. When planning an SEO campaign it is important to remember the two key ingredients (links and content). The search engine does not want to rank a really fancy bit of software at the top of its SERPs (search engine result pages) it wants to give them valuable content, it is up to your website to transfer that user from the content page to using your software, purchasing your products or buying your service.

What defines high quality SEO?

This depends who you speak to! My opinion of high quality in terms of content (which is what we need for good ethical SEO) is content of use to people, that is unique, content that is in an error free, content that is accessible, content that is on a search engine friendly website, opinionated, has enough depth to be able to influence/educate the user and content that I would personally be happy to link to from my website.

But what about new media?

Well quality SEO applies to this as well and depending on your business and target market will determine what media you use. This could be social media or video media either way you still need quality. What's the point in the search engine displaying a twitter page if it is just crammed with keywords rather than useful micro posts and why would you watch a 5 minuet video if it had no sound and a plain black picture of nothing?

Do ratings help differentiate quality and spam?

Many sites use rating systems (Amazon is a good example) and many social media sites use ratings (Facebook likes are a good example). I believe and many others that the search engines do use ratings. The reason for this is simple - Google for example has used links for years to determine good and bad content and to rank websites in its SERPs accordingly. A link is someone saying this site is of good quality and I think it is of value. In general terms the more links the higher you rank. A rating from a website on your content is exactly the same; it is someone saying I think this piece of information is of value so why wouldn't the search engines use it? The first reason is can it be easily manipulated by spammers? I can't think of a second reason. So in conclusion to that I think they do use them and I think over time as the web develops I think we will see these having more and more impact on the natural search engine rankings.

The search engines are aiming for one thing, quality results in its search engines. So when you are doing your SEO it needs to be quality SEO ever step of the way.