Editor’s Note: In the first part in our series on Optimizing for Relevancy, we discussed optimization, contextual advertising, and semantic analysis; in the second, we explained how bots work, optimal web page anatomy and site structure. In this, the third installment, Cody and Amit school us on writing content that works for both bots and bipeds.

How to write good content
Barbie says, “Math is hard.” We say, “Writing good content is tough.” While we are not about to give you tips on how to improve you literary skills, we have some do’s and don’ts that will allow you to make the most of what you have.

Content Do’s

• Write for users. Users come to your page to read your content, not to click on ads. The clicks just happen.
• Maintain your editorial integrity. Write unique articles that drive traffic to your site.
• Take time to optimize your web pages. Use distinct titles, headers and section headlines for each article.
• Limit the number of low-content pages on your site. If you have a page with lot of images, make sure you use alternate text.
• Maintain a high “signal-to-noise” ratio (more on this below).

Remember that high-paying ads on your site do not necessarily mean high revenue. It is important that users click on those ads for you to gain any financial benefit. Relevancy drives click-through-rate. Aim to make the content relevant to your users’ interests, which will help make the ads more appealing to your users. The more clicks you get, the more revenue you earn, and the more we learn about your page.

Tag: You’re it!
That sounds so meta, doesn’t it? But seriously, meta tags play an important factor in helping us determine what a page is about. If you take some time to work on your meta tags, it will result in better targeted ads for you and an easier time for search engines.

Here are some helpful tips for meta tags:

1. Place tags as high as possible in a page’s code; they should be the first thing that we see when analyzing your site.

2. Create compelling meta titles and descriptions with clear calls to action.

3. Include the most desired keywords, but keep repetition of individual words to a minimum. Place the most desired keywords at the front of the tag string. And don’t put any words in your tags that aren’t on your actual page. You don’t want to get spam email; and we don’t want to analyze spammy tags. We’ll just delete them, just like you did with that email with some strange pharmaceutical name in the subject line.

4. Exact per-tag character limits vary by the service that is analyzing your page, but in general try to keep your maximum per-tag character limits—including spaces and punctuation—to the following:

Meta Title Tag — 70 characters
Meta Description Tag — 250 characters
Meta Keyword Tags — comma delimited; 250 characters

Signal-to-noise ratio
Try to keep the content of each page focused on one or two topics at most. For example, let’s say you have a site about knitting. You might want to have a page dedicated entirely to yarn and yarn types. In that case, you’d want to repeat the word “yarn” multiple times on the page. But the page shouldn’t be “keyword-stuffed”—that is, the content should still be very useful and user-focused.

Most of this requires some initial effort to get started, but it is easy to fall into these good habits once you get going. Make these your rules to blog and publish by—they will be good for your users, good for our semantic analyzers, and good for your wallet. You can even turn it into a bit of a game: Make small changes here and there, and analyze the results in terms of the two key drivers, revenue and traffic. 

Implement, measure, optimize, repeat.

Next time: Content Don’ts

—Cody Simms, Senior Product Manager and Amit Paunikar, Senior Product Manager