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Loading...What kind of content is appreciated by Google?
A memorable update of the Panda algorithm which surprised SEO professionals almost a decade ago and the modifications following it enabled to draw several general conclusions:- Website content should be valuable for the users, not for search engine robots;
- Each of the published text should be unique;
- The authors ought to be experts in given fields and they should explore the subject in depth;
- It’s acceptable to use keywords, however, they need to be incorporated into the content in a natural way.
How do users read?
Let’s start from the very beginning. There must be a reason why we say that Internet users scan or browse. It takes us only a second to decide whether the content is useful and even then we read only one fifth of the whole text. Jakob Nielsen's research indicates that users track content according to the F pattern. It means that we thoroughly read only the first, clearly separated fragment of the content, then we scroll a little bit down (as the abovementioned letter shows) and finally we get to the end to go through a few lines of the text.
It is also important to enrich your content with images, photos or informative infographics. It will not anly make your content easier to read but also will make your user's more focused.
The potential of heat maps
Let’s begin from getting to know the concept of heat maps. These are collective data, combining three studies related to the user behavior on the Internet. Click tracking, scroll tracking, attention tracking and eye fixation enable to create a network indicating how and where Internet users move. The data allows to determine the most popular user behaviors - places where they move the mouse, click, how much they explore the website and which content is most visible to them. You can do your own research with the use of tools such as Crazy EGG or Smartlook.How to encourage users to read?
It’s a good idea to use the AIDA principle when building your content strategy. It’s an acronym of four words:
You need to find an optimal way to create an effective message - start from constructing headings, select suitable graphics, format your content and finally, focus on appropriate function of your text.
Drawing the users’ attention isn’t a piece of cake and it doesn’t guarantee that they’ll stay on your website and keep tracking the content. You should put every effort to make people interested in your texts, meet their expectations and suggest which specific steps should they take.
Three types of the Internet content
In web writing, we can distinguish three basic content types:- evergreen content,
- hard news,
- cyclical content.
