Thread: The Process of Creating Quality Content

The "process" has been on my mind lately when it comes to ensuring quality content, which has become a matter of life and death issue for some businesses after all Google has done over the last year.

The thing is, even when we don't really think about it we end up with some kind of a process, only it might not be as great as it could be. Even in the most straightforward case when you write all of your content yourself, the issue of process still matters. How do you come up with content ideas? What do you use for inspiration? How do you structure and format your content? What guidelines (if any) do you follow? But it's even more important when we pay other people to write content for us, because then we easily lose control over a lot of the factors that affect the final quality of the content. The only way out of that seems to be the right process, a set of steps that would efficiently ensure that the final result meets a certain standard.

I searched Google for "how good quality content is created", and I'm kind of disappointed with the results because most of them are about Google, and making good content solely because Google now requires it, and according to Google's guidelines. To me this seems like a very reactive approach to this. What I was really hoping for was advice about something more fundamental, like what kind of mindset, the culture, and structure typically produces great quality content. Yet most results seem to worry about quality as if it was some kind of a quantifiable thing like "keyword density" that you can shoehorn content into. (Yes Google algorithm does try to make it quantifiable, but only in a constant strive to match what most people already know by gut is "great" content, so we don't have to stoop to a level of an imperfect bot for this.)

I'm actually not that interested in that. Those Google quality guidelines may be important, but I think better results are possible if we change the fundamentals of our process, and then make any tweaks if necessary, but I have a feeling that if you have better fundamentals, the result will be such that it will require very little tweaking to appease Google.

So, what do you think those fundamentals could be? Try to forget Google for the moment and just focus on what makes for a good way to make great quality content; the ideal process. What does it take? I have some opinions, but I'll reserve them for now (this post is long enough already).

When I think of quality content, I actually first think of whether or not someone interested in the subject will find it interesting enough to read.

Is it interesting enough (and "quality" enough) for someone to want to share it with someone else?

I think that's where the "social" part of the equation comes in.

I think it really depends from niche to niche what is quality content. On a technical site writing in details is quality, on a wallpaper download site an easy access to the wallpaper which is in the right format and which is clean along with the page where you download it from is quality. Nowadays I take main focus on looks. People spend less and less time to read (simply because they want to run through a lot of content), so you have to attract their eyes, and provide nice visuals (images, photos, videos, animations) that will explain your topic faster than words could. Try it on social sites, one picture can tell so much more than words...

yes it depends to the niche. I guess its easier to write funnier article when your in a celebrity niche

Originally Posted by memenode

So, what do you think those fundamentals could be? Try to forget Google for the moment and just focus on what makes for a good way to make great quality content; the ideal process. What does it take? I have some opinions, but I'll reserve them for now (this post is long enough already).

Quality is important. But we also need to focus on the needs of the user to target keyword (needs) and provide quality content (the product).

The first fundamental that comes to mind is to do a needs analysis. The needs assessment process should identify the what (user needs) and opportunities (focus of content).