Google regularly updates the algorithm that calculates a page's relevance to a given search. Last year in February came the much debated panda update, which has since been updated many times, even as recently as April of this year. Having just returned from the Search Marketing Expo in London, we have lots of good ideas on how to ensure that the content on your website meets the new requirements.

With panda Google aims to weed out content without substance, ie sites with thin, useless, or just low quality content, in order to improve search results. Focus used to be on relevance, but now quality is just as important. It is no longer enough to find the right keywords and make sure to put them in the right places on the page. Now you also have to consider the user experience of the website as a whole, and whether it is a website that users like, trust, want to spend time on and  share with others in social media. Therefore, it is a good idea to follow these 3 tips if you want to future proof your website:

1. Create good quality content - site wide

First of all your content must be unique, grammatically correct, free of spelling errors and dead links. It also needs to be useful, informative, interesting and/or fresh. A website that is never updated does not give the impression of being particularly interesting. Last but not least, the quality must apply to the entire site as a whole. So you might want to remove low quality pages - or update them to become useful and interesting.


2. Ensure great design and user experience

Back in the day, you could search engine optimize a website, regardless of how it looked. That is not the case anymore. Both design and usability must be of great quality, ie. great graphics and images. Ads should not take up too much space. The usability of menu, structure, buttons, etc. must be considered. As an extra benefit, you can expect to harvest more links, more user activity, social media shares, likes and tweets, if you do it properly.

3. Use statistics to investigate user behavior in order to improve it

You can use statistics to identify sites of poor quality. Look at how much time the user has spent on site, bounce rate, page views, direct traffic, etc. Which pages have none or very little traffic? Which has a high bounce rate? Which receive poor user feedback? Pages that stick out and are of poor quality should be addressed. Additionally, you can also use the statistics tool to keep an eye on whether the changes you make to the website in general also improve user experience.

Quality takes time, and there are no quick short cuts if you want to future proof your website. Use your statistics tool wisely, and once you have removed poor quality content, then start improving your most important pages first. Then you can work your way down to lower level pages as time allows

Find more information about what Google sees as quality content on Google's own blog.