This image above is an attempt to show that Google, and Users, are looking for information that would fit the top write of both quadrants. This position fits the ideal for pages that will be shared, viewed regularly and develop a following.
SEO copywriting is an artform that many so called SEO companies fail to master. The graph above shows the four extremes of any web article. On the one extreme you have uninteresting content, that lacks detail and is technically wrong or lacking in technical accuracy. This extreme is typified by many article marketing websites, where the content is borderline unreadable. The other extreme is interesting, factually correct original content, which is probably the holy grail of content. Websites that do this well feature highly in search terms for every day items like “iphone 4 review” etc.
The main purpose of the image above is to show how websites use original and interesting information to get links to their pages, increase traffic, become an authority and rank well for the keywords they choose.The only other metric that is missing from this table is “consistency”. Search engine crawlers look for consistent keyword placement within the text of an article, the title and the description tag.
The main goal of ANY copywriting is to interest and persuade the reader. Writing that “optimizes” a search but offers little useful information or only weak persuasion will end up not converting the customer, and is unlikely to get any natural inbound links. A good example of this is About.com and HowTo.com, which were recently punished in Google’s Panda update. These articles actually turn away from the site rather than generating sales.
What sets apart websites like Arstechnica.com is that they add detail and offer incite into the articles they are writing. They often add interesting opinion too. This makes the content not only stand out to search engines, but also to readers as well. Most normal news websites like SMH.com.au rarely add extra incite into international news. Only on local breaking stories, where they have active journalists on the ground, do they show where their strengths lie. Websites like Reddit and blog collections on WordPress.com fall somewhere in the middle. They may have interesting content, but the discussions on Reddit rarely warrant interest to anyone but memehunters. Blogs often have interesting content, but lack the technical detail and consistency that would place them high in search engines and high in people’s RSS feeds.
Another way of looking at good content is that you need to become a thought leader. Make your content interesting and technically correct, to stand out.