What is Good Quality Content

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Today I want to share with you my definition of good quality content. In my opinion, good quality content connects a website with its readers. Good quality content benefits both readers and webmaster.

For readers, it provides answers to their queries quickly and satisfactorily. It is well written, the choice of words is clear, precise and concise. Where necessary, readers are provided links to more indepth information. The visitor to sites with good quality content understands immediately it is about. He recognizes the author is a subject matter expert, an authority in his field. A searcher landing on a website with good quality content stops there. He does not continue searching. He has found all he needs.

Good quality content help website owners generate traffic, keep the traffice and monetize the traffic. Where a website owner's goal is to earn an income from his site, having a site with good quality content ensures an continuous flow of passive income. It is the fruit of having done the due diligence in generating content that is original and well-written.

How to write good quality content? A would-be webmaster should approach his subject authoritatively. Even if he is not an expert in the subject, he should be willing to do his homework, to gather the information, to assemble it in way that is easy to follow, to never lose sight of his reader's quest for information.

A sloppily assembled website, with content copied from other websites, is unlikely to rival an original site in terms of traffic. Search engines today are smart enough to evaluate the originality of content.

Originality of content does not mean writing something that nobody has written before. If you create a topic on a subject of your own creation - about some doohickey that you assembled in your backyard - it may only get limited passer-by traffic. To get good, continuous traffic, you want to write on subjects that are sufficiently popular and in demand, not something obscure that only you know anything about.

Originality of content means you explain a well-known subject in your own words, and explain it well. As a writer of travel guides, I describe destinations with full awareness that someone else have also done the same. So the originality of my travel websites lies not in describing places that nobody else has described before, but rather, in describing those places in my own words. Sure, in order to write my sites, I may have referred to travel books, other websites, interviewed people, etc. That is part of the research I conduct. It does not dilute the originality of my content. Even when I report something that has already appeared in another travel book or travel site, I am describing it in my own words.

Describing things "in your own words" does not mean you have the license to write bad English. By all means, polish your language till it shines. Re-read what you have written. It may make sense in your head, but sound very different when read out. You may detect typos and grammatical errors that escaped you earlier. Such care for your "craftsmanship" marks you as above the rest. We are human, and we all make mistakes in our writing. But if we are consciously more careful, we reduce the number of mistakes.

The web is democratic. It rewards those who deserve to be rewarded. Although run by machines, the human element of your content is what generates and continue to bring traffic to your site.