The World Wide Web is still dominated by written content, mainly because search enquiries are text based. Audio and visual content is increasing all the time but it’s purpose is primarily to engage and captivate the audience once there. It’s very much a chicken and egg scenario as both have their advantages when trying to increase a website’s success. There is however no sign on the horizon of text content’s importance dissipating in the eyes of the major search engines.

Google is crying out for unique, quality content nowadays, but you should be aware there are certain factors that classify the uniqueness of an article or blog. Information also needs to be delivered on the page at a time that people are searching for it under a relevant search term.

What do we mean? Well, believe it or not there are people who make a living online by purchasing products  that are presented incorrectly or titled wrongly only to repackage them, market them correctly and resell them for a considerable profit!

This tactic is not solely reserved for physical products either. Website content is a valuable commodity where the original author obtains prime positioning by the uniqueness of their article and being able to write about the specific search terms they ideally want to rank highly for.

For example, take a look at the following article which we want to be ‘found’ under the search terms “Unique content for SEO” and “Unique content for Search Engine Optimisation.”

As it happens this article is diverse enough to rank for many different relevant terms as well as the two above.

But, will it be unique still?

Every website has a combination of content, as well as a different audience to satisfy with that content. There are websites that spew countless articles and topics for no other reason than to generate traffic, quality is almost a secondary consideration to them.

Actually, the number one factor which determines a website’s success is quality rather than uniqueness. Of course, it helps if it’s unique too, but quality is the prime requirement for the content.

Here’s an article that should send you to sleep that we have uploaded using an RSS feed.

‘What exactly is unique content?
In one of his Whiteboard Fridays, Rand talks about uniqueness of content and the way content can be categorised into three major types. He cites the example of a search in the travel industry which throws up very similar results on the top results in the SERPs.

Most of the content is from the same source of User Generated Content (UGC). From the user experience perspective, the content on the sites are almost the same, leading to a stalemate. This is where fresh updated unique content can surcharge the user’s energies and rev up the interest in the product or service they are looking for.

By unique content, it’s not just laying out content in correct grammatical form, in a unique style to escape the content duplication filter of major search engines. It’s the inherent value of the content itself and the ideas portrayed therein that make the content unique.

If you’re an expert in a certain industry and you’ve worked in the trenches and have a lot of knowledge of the inner workings of that industry, then the ideas expressed and the tone and quality of your content will show that you are indeed an expert.

This is most importantly recognised by other users who can clearly decipher you are indeed an expert. This will be reflected by a spike in the visitors to your blog, to read your posts, and the increase in subscribers to your blog feed.

If you state clearly in your article or post that the content is free to be circulated, provided there is a credit at the bottom through a link back to your site, the merit of your content will ensure that it gets circulated well and truly over the cybersphere.

It’s common to find, especially in the field of affiliate marketing, site owners who have no clue as to the specific niche the product is in, getting content creation outsourced to create an e-book or articles with its variations, which in turn are used for promotion to gain inbound links and ultimately sales. The lower the costs of outsourcing, the more fluff that gets dished around the web.

Search engine algorithms today are superior in analysing the uniqueness of a given piece of content. They look at the navbar, the sidebar and footer links and the content itself to analyse its uniqueness. Gone are the days when a customised introduction and conclusion to an article made it unique. It’s a lot harder now.

You can create all the content that you want but it is the search engines that determine its uniqueness and include it in their main index or banish it for lack of quality and the poor amount of inbound links it garners to have a low Pagerank threshold that prevents it from getting retained in the main index.

What kind of content should you adopt for your site?
When you have an idea for a website, that’s when you have to determine the type of content that will suit your site. You cannot change horses midstream. Rand talks about the three widely prevalent types of content on the web today:

1) Editorial Content:
This refers to the content that is built by a human with a clear idea as the basis, then logic and reasoning that is initiated by a good introduction and great body copy that expresses the idea in lucid fashion and a healthy conclusion. The style and expression is unique to each writer. Good examples are a site owner blogging on their site coming up with unique content on a regular basis that keeps readers engaged and also garners great inbound editorial links from their industry peers and the linkerati in general. This type of content is ideal for smaller sites.

2) Machine Built Content:
If you have a burning ambition to dominate your niche or industry, then machine built content can be handy in satisfying your desire. This involves collecting data from reliable sources and pushing it into a fixed well formatted content structure by way of an xml file and ‘stored in’ databases. Content pages are generated on the fly in response to user clicks on the site.

The biggest problem here is the pattern that is obviously common to most machine built content sites. The ‘on page’ factors like page titles and # tags are unique on each page. But the content follows a fixed pattern with subtle changes in data, as in case of statistical information. Most major travel sites employ this technique.

It’s scalable and saves time and money. But it does not make the cut when it comes to the search engines analysing it for, you guessed it right, its uniqueness. A content duplication filter can definitely prevent such a page from getting indexed.

From an SEO perspective, if the domain on which such content resides is a trusted mature one of good standing, then it would not be a major issue. For newer sites (typically less than a year old) trying to establish themselves rapidly, it could be a major stumbling block.

3) User Generated Content (UGC):
This is the most valuable type of content any site owner could have on their site. But it does not come easy. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a bustling community and incentivise the contributors to make the content creation happen. Some of the popular examples are Wikipedia, Reddit and Digg.

This is a powerful and scalable technique but it’s not easy to get a network of dedicated users scaling it up to the higher levels of content creation.

You can consider using content from each of the above mentioned categories or a nice blend of them to create unique content that can satisfy visitors to your site and keep them engrossed longer on your site’s pages. The amount of time spent by users on your site is certainly a factor the search engines could consider to determine the quality of your site content.

Most times, we hear site owners clamouring for links and/or aspiring for higher positions on the SERPs. One of the major factors that can propel a site to the top of the search engine summit is unique quality content. This arises from personal experiences of the blogger and the successful practice and implementation of the actual content that is being preached by them in their day to day blogging activities.

Once justice has been done to this crucial part, then it’s only a matter of time before users identify the good quality advice offered on your site and the ‘twittering’ and ‘digging’ of your posts akin to the Web’s word of mouth, propels your site into the limelight which is top rankings on the SERPs.

The number of inbound links from a variety of domains of different hues (domain diversity) and the naturally worded anchor text in the inbound links to your site are proof enough of the confirmation aspect of your post’s nature, from unbiased external sources in the most natural form, erasing any doubt about the duplication of content in the eyes of the search engines.’