Bo Henriksens’s Weblog

Working in the R&D department of a SEO company, I often get the following two questions:

First people ask me “What is SEO?”, and after having answered that, or pointed people to the Wikipedia definition of SEO, they usually follow up by saying “That sounds like a nice thing, how do I do that on my website?”. Then when I start answering the question, or give them some general advice on SEO, they tend to either loose interest in it, or say that its to complicated for them to do.

Tor those who think it is too complicated, I must have failed in my explanation, for in my opinion SEO is a pretty simple concept. So I end up telling them to read Matt Cutt’s blog, for he often has som easy free advice on what to do, or at least on what not to do.

Then a little while ago I discussed SEO with technically savvy friend of mine, and we got into the details of duplicate content issues and stuff like that and he ended up saying “So one would rather have Googlicate content than duplicate content!”. I kind of like the him naming it Googlicate content, and have used it since, in my trying to make simple what good content is from a SEO point of view.

So after some thinking, rethinking and reformulating my (pretty long) rule of thumb on creating Googlicate content is:

When creating content for a specific keyword or keyphrase, have someone, preferably from your target audience, read the page. Then ask them if they would be satisfied if they found that page when searching for that keyword or keyphrase.

If they are satisfied, you should be satisfied, but most often there will be parts of the text that needs a rewrite or two. This is because the people writing the text typically has a deeper understanding of the product or service they are writing about, and then the text will be to complicated for the target audience.

Having said this, there is a lot more to SEO than good content. Before starting to write, you need to find the keywords/keyphrases that you will write to, and this is often a more complicated task than writing the text itself.

To sum up this post: When trying to write Googlicate content, think about the user, not the search engines. A good relevant user experience will result in good search engine rankings in the long run.