Every website owner wants their website to rank well on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is basically what you can do to your website to boost it in the search engine rankings.

If you want your website to appear at or near the top of search results, you need to do certain things to keep search engines happy. When you tell the internet what your business is about, search engines will direct visitors to your website who they think will benefit from what you offer.

What kind of content ranks best?

Ask any SEO expert what type of content ranks best in today’s search engines and the answer is always the same. Google wants one thing, and that is quality content.

Google wants to offer its users the best possible results. There are two main things that it analyzes to identify if the content is of good quality.

1. Commitment

How interesting is your content? Are people really reading the entire article or are they hitting the back button the moment they see it? This is how Google measures engagement. They want to know how long people stay to read your content. If they stay for several minutes, they know you’re providing value.

This is what is called your bounce rate. A lower bounce rate can help rankings. If users usually click back and your website has persistently high bounce rates, this can affect your website’s ranking on Google.

2. Backlinks

The second thing that Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. observe is the behavior of the links. Search engines know that people link to content they find valuable. The content that is considered useful or interesting is most often shared by users. Content deemed worthless is not shared.

Write content for users, not search engines

If you produce your website content just so it can rank high, you may get stuck stuffing your content with too many keywords. This then becomes unreadable to the human eye. These types of covert SEO tactics rarely work and even if they do, the result is only short term. Search engines will detect this and ignore your website.

Useful content leads to happy users and a low bounce rate, happy users link to and share the content, which leads to more traffic, which leads to higher rankings on Google.