Yesterday I covered an article from Pandia that dealt with generating good content and focusing on the long-term benefits of search optimization.  The gist of the article, in case you missed it, was that quality content and user value can have just as much influence on your site's success as golden SEO.  Ultimately, it doesn't matter if you rank well in search engines if your content isn't worth reading.

Like many other things, creating good content is often easier said than done.  And it's often a balancing act between writing what you want to say and writing what the search engines will respond well to.  But there are a few guidelines that can help you create content worth reading and worth indexing.

Readers are Human

First and foremost, it's important to remember that human eyes, not search engine crawlers, will do the majority of the reading at your site.  It's obvious when you stumble across a website that has been written for search engines only.  Sentences don't always make sense.  The same message gets repeated twenty different times in twenty slightly different ways.  You can tell that those sites were created to maximize keyword saturation and not much else.

If you write content that makes sense and is easily readable to humans it's still quite possible to score high marks on keyword saturation.  In fact, good writing is naturally saturated with keywords.  When you factor in the added bump that your site can get when people link to you, the inevitable conclusion is that your content will start ranking higher.  But will people link to sites that are written for search engines?  No.  So before all other things, make sure your content is for human eyes.

The Topic - Stay On It

There's a difference between a well-written and comprehensive post and rambling.  That keyword saturation that I mentioned comes naturally when content is focused on a single topic.  If you're writing a post or page about trout, write about trout… and only trout.  Cover as many trout-related subtopics as you need to.  But don't wander off into fishing spots and tackle.  Instead, save that information for another post or page that can focus solely on fishing spots and tackle.

Think of search engine crawlers as people and then put yourself in the crawler's shoes.  If you read one of your pages, would you know what the main topic was?  Would you be able to pick a keyword or two that sums up the entire page?  When a search engine crawler stops by to scan your trout page, it should be painfully obvious that the topic is trout.  If you were talking to a friend, and they went off into a million side topics during your chat, you'd get bored and lose interest, wouldn't you?  Same thing here.

Be Complete, But Be Concise

You can tell when someone is rambling, right?  Can't you also tell when someone has been talking for 30 minutes and not really said what they were trying to say?  When you write, make sure you're not only staying on topic, but that you're also actually getting the point across.  Introductory text is nice… back story is sometimes needed… and commentary can add a personal touch to your writing.  But don't windbag it.  Say what needs to be said.

I had a teacher once who said the format for any writing project is "tell them what you're going to say, say it, tell them what you just said".  I still think that format works.  And it's possible to follow it without being overly wordy.  A couple of sentences to introduce the topic… a couple of paragraphs about the topic… a couple of sentences in conclusion to pull everything together and bring it to a close.  Aaaron Wall at SEOBook.com says this about wordiness:

Good writing does not add extra words for the sake of word count. Each word carries purpose and meaning.

Read over your content.  Does each word have a purpose?  Does each sentence?  If not, get rid of it.  Don't go overboard and create 4 sentence paragraphs for each page.  But don't write 2000 words when 500 will do.

Conclusions

Be your own judge.  Review your content and ask yourself if you'd want to read it.  Would you want to read more of the same kind of writing?  Does it flow and make sense?  Is it obvious what the topic is?  Could the same thing be said in a more condensed format?  Also, keep these tips, also from Aaron Wall, in mind when creating search engine friendly content:

Since Google's relevancy algorithms are looking more for natural writing, the value of having small hyper-focused pages is not as good as it once was…good copy gets just as much traffic for long tail keywords you didn't intend on optimizing for.

Google is getting stingier with how they crawl and what they are willing to index. If they will only index 100 pages for x units of PageRank then having nearly 100% of a 100 page site indexed is far better than having 40 or 50% of a 200 page site indexed.

If you put garbage at the top of a SERP, it's still garbage.  Content can guarantee that your rankings are not only good for rankings, but also good for the user.  And ultimately, the user is the one clicking, spending, and converting.