Content is King, Queen and the Joker in the Deck

You can find the "content is king" quote all over the Web in articles about SEO simply because it's true. As Google and the other engines have evolved, they have become much more effective in gleaning the meaning of page content, how it relates to the overall site subject matter, and how visitors perceive its value.

How does Google know what visitors think about your content? If you're using Google Analytics, which is a great way for you to know what your visitors are doing on your site, Google definitely knows how long they stay on a page and where they go from there. If they stay on a page a while, then the assumption is that content of value is there and visitors are reading it. If they take links from that page to other pages on your site, the assumption is that you're helping the visitor learn more about what they came there to see.

Even if you're not using Analytics, you can bet that Google knows what they're doing anyway after they arrive from a Google search. Google's algorithms are highly secret and very complex, but we do know that Google is learning a lot about individual user preferences and Web activities and applying that knowledge to large groups of users based on common destinations and surfing activities.

The more complex the algorithms and analytics measurements, the more detailed the profile of your site and content. It's no longer about packing keywords into a page over and over again. In fact, you'll get penalized very quickly for "keyword stuffing" these days. Google has made giant leaps in understanding what constitutes valuable content for the site visitor. One of the newer and very powerful content analysis tools used by Google is LSI, Latent Semantic Indexing.