Does Google Need Our Content?

Straight in today, does Google need our content? And how do we find out?

Google serves up results based on an algorithm which basically is a fancy piece of software that collects and sorts web pages. This software is highly secret or otherwise webmasters would just analyse it and find ways of artificially increasing their web sites rankings.

Like scientists who discover planets in the far off galaxies we can’t directly observe this algorithm, we can only measure it by the effect it has. Oh my god!!

There a few ways of determining whether Google will want the content we produce based on our keywords and although perhaps not entirely accurate it is based again on best guess.

So, we have found a keyword phrase of three to six words, now what? Well first we need to know how much other information is already out there that Google knows about.

The simplest way to do this is to go the the search engine and type in our keyword. Google will return a list of results with an indication of how many pages it thinks is relevant to the search. If you get a return of over two million you may want to start over.

Now to refine this very broad search is to enclose your keyword in quotes i.e. “keyword phrase” and search again. You will notice that now there are much fewer returns. This is called exact search and identifies pages that contain the exact phrase, hence the name. This gives you a much better indication of how many other pages you will be competing against.

As a rough guide I like to look for competition numbers of less than 50,000 and the lower the better. After you have done this there are a couple of other ways to gauge the work you will have to do but we will discuss them next time.

Related posts:

1. Does Google Need Our Content? Part 2
2. Finding The Golden Keyword
3. More Keyword Research
4. Content Content Content