Content Optimization (CO) is a subset of SEO helping you to audit/edit your content and make it more appealing to search engines.

Of course, the tools and technics used for content optimization depend on the content type. However, you can consider the following subcategories of the content optimization as the most important ones:

• Article optimization
• Image optimization
• Video optimization
• Link optimization
• News optimization
• Product review optimization

Further reading: Content Marketing Institute‘s guide to content optimization is a good starting point if you’d like to know more about this topic.

Note: Do not confuse the content optimization technics with similar topics such as landing page optimization. Although these concepts are equally important, the former is about attracting more organic traffic while the latter is concerned with conversion rate. Sometimes these two dimensions are aligned with each other, however, there are many cases in which, there is an inevitable trade-off between them.

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As the old mechanical content evaluation algorithms are changing to a huge and complicated machine learning system, it gets harder every day to describe the detailed properties of contents which are favored by Panda.

Therefore, a new term has emerged in SEO jargon: The thin content.

Although it’s so easy to understand what the thin content is, there’s not any clear metric for measuring thinness or thickness of a piece of content!

Definition of thin content

Google defines the thin content as content with little or no added value.

According to google’s description, the following content types are more likely to be classified as thin content:

• Automatically generated contents
• Affiliate programs
• Scraped content
• Doorway pages

Even before Panda update and imposing penalties for thin content, search engines have always been against low quality and thin content. Panda update for thin content is just one of the many steps have been taken by Google and other search engines to demote non-valuable contents in the search results.

However, cheap and click-thirsty websites always find new ways to utilize thin content in attracting traffic and seems that this cat-and-mouse game will continue in future.

Deliberate use of thin contents in the websites

Thin content is not necessarily short. Also, not every long content can be considered as rich and thick!

There’s two critical question for recognizing thin contents:

• Do you have contents that do not match the title (for your frequent visitor)?
• Do you have entrance pages that don’t match their respective search queries?

Considering above questions, there are many cases that site administrators intentionally deliver thin content.

Here are two examples of intentionally think contents:

• A medium length content divided into very small pieces to get more clicks for a single topic.
• Publishing feeds from other blogs to get more clicks. Although this strategy leads to a better Alexa rank, it’s prone to delivering thin content as you would not have been able to exert necessary controls on the quality of the fed content.

Unintentional thin contents in blogs

Many blogging platforms, including WordPress as the most popular one, generate think contents automatically even if you are intended to do so.

Here are some of the automatically generated thin contents:

• Single posts on a specific tag or category: Let’s suppose that I have just one post about Seth Godin and have tagged it with Seth Godin. Both pages will have the same content, and I would face with the double content issue. The most common solution to this problem is using post excerpts in tags and categories. This would eliminate (actually reduce) double content issue. However, a new issue would appear. A piece of thin content! A URL with 50 or 70 words tagged with Seth Godin. Even if Google do not penalize this URL as thin content, it will become a high-bounce page in your website.
• Automatically generated contents: User profiles, reply to comments, and paginated posts are just a few examples of automatically generated contents. Such pages would not be necessarily thin. However, it’s reasonable to check them as the first chances of thin-contents in a website. Google webmaster’s URL parameters tool is a very quick and handy solution for such problems.
• High Bounce Pages: As Stephen Kenwright says in his article about thin content, not all bounces are created equal. There are good bounces and bad bounces. But still it’s logical to check your high bounce pages (With the bounce rate of 75% or more) for thinness. You may find many thin contents that you have never been aware of.

The thin content threat is something beyond Panda, SEO and Google penalties

Although there are many technical mistakes that may lead to the creation of thin content, any rational SEO specialist would accept that a large portion of the thin content problem, has roots in the shallow understanding of content strategy.

Yes. Having just one post on a tag would create various thin contents automatically. But there’s a more critical question: Why you have just one article about a topic in your website? If this article is linked to your other ones, there should be other instances of your tag. Otherwise, there can be just two reasons:

Otherwise, there can be just two reasons. Either you have not included a professional content tagging system in your content strategy, or you are trying to catch cheap traffic with non-relevant articles.

Both of the above mistakes are not technical and should be considered as faults in the strategic level.

The answer to the thin content problem is lean content, not long content

It’s necessary to emphasize again that thin content is not the same of short content.

Therefore, making a piece of irrelevant thin content longer doesn’t change the nature that content.

So although we read the think content vs. thick content here and there, it would be much more strategic if we compare thin content with lean content.

As Heidi Cohen has provided a very insightful article about the elements of lean content, I do not repeat it here. However, I do strongly recommend you to read that article if you are concerned about thin content issue.

Recommended articles about thin content

Fat pandas and think content – Strongly Recommended (MOZ Blog)

Syndication problems and how to manage them (SearchEngineWatch)

How to find thin content in your website (Vertical Leap)

How to identify and recover from Google Panda penalty for thin content (Quicksprout)

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The keyword intensive article writing has been a classic black-hat technique for SEO in the last decade.

For years, SEO technicians recommended their clients to repeat their target keyword as much as possible in their article.

So if I wanted to have an article about content marketing in the first SERPs, I had to consider so many occurrences of the term content marketing in my article.

This is an example:

Content marketing is the most popular approach in the current marketing era. Of course there are other approaches beside content marketing but still many experts believe that content marketing is the most effective approach. If you want to get acquainted with content marketing and use content marketing to…

The measure of keyword density appeared as one of the key success factors of the pages in SEO.

After a couple of updates in Google search algorithm, articles with high-density keywords got penalized and marked as SEO black-hat.

Soon, SEO experts learned to consider an upper-bound to keyword density and recommended the authors to bound keyword density between a lower and upper range (typically 1.5% and 3-4%).

Nowadays, everyone knows that keyword density is not a single best indicator of the relevance anymore. Even it can not be a reliable predictive indicator!

Although Google is getting closer to an automated learning machine and is not going to work on explicit search algorithms as before, still there are some clues to find the substitute for the old-fashioned keyword-rich SEO approach.

Semantic Structure Analysis is the new approach to evaluating the articles and LSI (Latent Semantic Index) seems to be one of the ruling indexes of the current article evaluation.

Besides so many mathematical calculations and extraction of eigenvalues and eigenvectors, let me describe the LSI function in a very easy way:

Consider two different articles both with Apple in the title and 5% density of Apple keyword in the body. How can we recognize that which one is about the famous mobile phone producer and which one is talking about the well-known fruit?

It’s so easy. Take a look at the other words in the article. If there are other tech-related words (e.g., phone, connectivity, screen, touch, etc.) you can categorize it as a technical article. But, if you find many other health-related words such as taste and poison and digestion, it’s more likely that we are reading an article about fruit!

The same idea can be applied to measuring and comparing the relevance of the two articles on the same topic.

In a real article about content marketing, it’s more likely to see other content marketing terms beside the main canonical term. Somewhere there must be a notion of content strategy. Somewhere else you should be able to see something about content type and so on.

It would be easier to understand the concept if you check the following address. There are many other options available on the web for the same purpose.

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Google Analytics: Sure you know google analytics. But there’s no other choice. Every list of analyzing tools has to be started with google.

Ahrefs: Checking backlinks, Pagerank and many other SEO parameters. You have to register your email for receiving more detailed reports (Don’t miss Ahref’s Position Explorer Tool).

Alexa: There’s nothing to say about Alexa. Virtually everyone on the web, uses Alexa for monitoring local and global rank of the websites.

Similarweb: Sure Alexa is a more popular service for measuring and monitoring your website rank. But similarweb provides you with valuable information about the interests of your visitors as well as historical trend of visits. Similarweb has a very powerful algorithm for estimating your unique monthly visitors.

Woorank: Would be a very professional tool for assessing your website. If someone else has developed your website and you are not so professional in website design, just try Woorank. It has a wonderful analysis capability.

On-Page SEO tool: A very simple yet useful minimalistic tool for suggesting you the best one-word, two-word, three-word combinations which have more opportunity to be promoted by search engines.

GTMertics: A very helpful tool for site designers. Analyzing every detail of the website including loading time of every script and CCS errors and many other indicators which website designers and administrators are interested in.

Pingdom: Calculating your website loading time with a detailed cascading report.

Nibbler: Assessing your website from various aspects such as accessibility, experience, marketing and technology.

Browserling: Helps you to see how your website is viewed in different browsers and devices.

Browseo: Helps you to see your website the same way as search engines see it.

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