Content Production: Google Gives Us Things to Do, Bing Offers Things to Avoid

Effective Content Writing

As our friends at Google and Bing begin to help us by offering tips on what kinds of things they are looking for our SEO directives must adhere to their word.  In the latest offering Bing has provided us with a list of things to do and things to avoid when producing quality content.  Although Bing is generally not the target of most SEO’s ranking decisions it can still be a good source of driving traffic and I always say that it is good to get it where you can.

To sum it all up Bing mentions two critical components of producing quality content by their fair standard.  The first is creating content that is high quality, engages the user, and answers any and all questions they may have.  The second measure is the search engines themselves.  The example Bing uses is sites that have content similar to other websites such as Ecommerce sites and common product descriptions.  Not having original content means Bing doesn’t find you flashy enough and may not index you.

Here is the list of things Bing says to avoid when producing content:

Duplicate content – don’t use articles or content that appears in other places.  Produce your own unique content.

Thin content – don’t produce pages with little relevant content on them – go deep when producing content – think “authority” when building your pages.  Ask yourself if this page of content would be considered an authority on the topic.

All text/All images – work to find a balance here, including images to help explain the content, or using text to fill in details about images on the page.  Remember that text held inside an image isn’t readable by the crawlers.

Being lonely – enable ways for visitors to share your content through social media.

Translation tools – rarely does a machine translation tool leave you with content that reads properly and that actually captures the original sentiment.  Avoid simply using a tool to translate content from one language to the next and posting that content online.

Skipping proofreading – when you are finished producing content, take the time to check for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and for the overall flow when reading.  Does it sound like you’re repeating words too frequently?  Remove them.  Don’t be afraid to rewrite the content, either.

Long videos – If you produce video content, keep it easily consumable.  Even a short 3 – 4 minute video can be packed with useful content, so running a video out to 20 minutes is poor form in most instances.  It increases download times and leads to visitor dissatisfaction at having to wait for the video to load.  Plus, if you are adding a transcription of your video, even a short video can produce a lengthy transcription.

Excessively long pages – if your content runs long, move it to a second page.  Readers need a break, so be careful here to balance the length of your pages.  Make sure your pagination solution doesn’t cause other issues for your search optimization efforts, though.

Content for content’s sake – if you are producing content, be sure its valuable.  Don’t just add text to every page to create a deeper page.  Be sure the text, images or videos are all relevant to the content of the page.

For help creating quality content hire the help of professional SEO content writers to get the competitive edge your business needs.