I came across this statement recently and I thought I would share it with everyone. It bears repeating to all those who want to place better in search engine rankings.

Don’t try to make Google look stupid.

What this means is that Google needs to return useful information to searchers to stay in business. The better they do, the more profitable they will be. Google will continue to get better at getting rid of the junk so if you want to continue to rank well in the long term, you will need to work with Google. In other words, you’ll need to give searchers what they’re looking for.

Learning to make your web pages more useful will have a large effect on your search engine optimization, in a many ways:

• It protects you from spam complaints
• It creates natural links, in the short term and the long term
• It creates a positive branding effect
• It protects you from being penalized after visual inspections

If you’re competing against a web page that’s getting more natural links than you, it’s going to be hard to complete. You need to switch it around so that you are getting the natural links.

Provide A More Complete Resource On Your Subject

Take a look at the other sites that currently rank in the top 10 of Google for your keyword. Are they providing information that you aren’t? If so, I would highly recommend improving the quality of information you’re providing. This might be as simple as adding a few additional sentences or paragraphs to your informational article.

If you’re selling a product on your web page, you can provide user reviews, or a video of the product being used.

If you’re selling your own product, you may have to improve your product to be the most useful.

Add Links To Relevant Content Within Your Site

There are tons of cases where a user could benefit from being pushed to another page of your site. Let’s say for example purposes that a user came to my site searching for ’search engine optimization’. It would be very useful to that user to find what I have about ‘link building’, ‘keyword research’, and many other topics. That means that I can add to the usefulness of my web page by creating links that a searcher might find helpful.

Add The Ability To Leave Comments

Allowing users to comment can really add to the usefulness of a webpage. Not only will you get free content for your page, you will also get insight into what the searcher was originally looking for. This can help you to make the resource more complete. You will not only get questions in your comments, you will also get answers. In some cases this aspect can be covered by adding a forum to your site.

Add Images To Your Web Page

Images can often really add to the presentation. No, you don’t need to use images on every web page you create. However, you may be able to add to the usefulness of a web page if you do. In some cases, graphs or charts may make your page more useful.

Apply Formatting

No one wants to read a huge block of non formatted text. You may have the best resource in web for your keyword, but if it looks terrible, people will not read it. Adding some bullets, headings, and some bolded text might change the feel significantly.

Add Video

I’ve found that explaning things with video or with a screen cast is about 100 times easier for me than typing it out. Videos also take less time for me to make than writing posts does. I wouldn’t recommend going solely with video on a web page but it can really add to the presentation if you include a video or screencast on your web page.

Vidoe is not able to provide content to a search engine, but it is great content for a searcher. Eventually other people will link to that video article increasing it's value to a search engine.

Overall

There are alot of steps to be sure, and it is difficult to perform every task on every article you add to your site. But once in a while take a look at the content you have created and see if you are taking into account these important factors in building your pages and your overall site.