This article will shed light on the factors that contribute to the potency of off-page content published as articles or press releases. The content should be of value to human readers and search engines alike.

I started to read an SEO article about criminal record checks and spotted an erroneous statement right away in the second sentence. There is an assumption in the second sentence that wasn't researched, likely because there's a general belief in Canada about having the right to remain silent when arrested. Criminals, police, and lawyers know better. In the 4th sentence there's another mistake but it doesn't relate to pardons (Canada has no constitutional guarantee of a right to food and shelter), so there are 2 untrue statements in the first 5 sentences. The article states:

"Everyone in this country has rights. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to freedom of speech and religion. You have the right to refuse medication. You have the right to food and shelter. However, sometimes other people have the right to know about you and your past criminal history."

In fact, Canadians being arrested (ask any of your clients who have been arrested) are told only that they have a right to a lawyer, not that they can remain silent - this is not the U.S. where they have the Miranda Rights - we in Canada have no such right to remain silent according to a Supreme Court decision (R. v. Singh (163 C.R.R. (2d) 280) where the suspect asserted a right to remain silent 18 times but the police continued questioning him after each assertion. Canadians have a right to retain counsel and be given a reasonable amount of time to contact a lawyer, but not the right to have counsel present during the interrogation. The Supreme Court ruled that continued questioning, in spite of protests by the accused, is consistent with Canada's Charter of Rights protections.

The effectiveness of SEO articles depends on innovative advice, trend predictions, breakthroughs - something new backed by the most recent facts and statistics available. Writing some details that simply parrot what's written on your website won't be treated as a valuable piece of content…it won't get a good ranking or be downloaded to spread the links. An article should be written around a theme that will fit into a category that is available. Next, the piece should put forward a hypothesis, then logically provide proof and reach a conclusion that will be enlightening within the particular market sector. If an article can point out something everybody in the industry should know, then it will become popular enough to reach an optimal number of eZines, blogs on other relevant websites, RSS feeds, etc.

After several years of observation on the behavior of article rankings, it appears that bland articles or those that are spun from other articles don't make it into the first two pages. However, high-quality ones where there was careful research and composition (along with pre-formatting to match the various directory requirements for efficient submission) can occupy as many as four or five spots on the first page and a few more on the other pages. This effect is temporary and occurs several weeks after publication; Google is then forced to consolidate space by retrieving the site itself, after which the articles withdraw backward suddenly. The resulting position of the site's pages has proven to be uniformly high - in the top 5, and when deep linking is done many of the rankings will show two pages, one indented, so that your website takes up 20% of the available space instead of 10% and draws more traffic. This effect is permanent because the content is viral and so the links multiply and become more valuable. Link quantity is necessary, but those links are judged mainly by link quality.

Link quality is one of the many intangibles that have become most important because the Web 2.0 environment is content-driven. Not only do the anchor text keywords need to be planned out to have as little repetition as possible, but the content around it must exert relevance to the link and the subject matter on the web page it leads to. The embedded text should bring order out of chaos and catch the interest of the crawlers. Google likes to read new and exciting information like humans, but it's a vastly bigger thinking machine so its boredom with reading weak copy is multiplied.

Another intangible factor is intent. The sophistication of search engines has allowed them to clear out much of the nonsense and porn that plagued the internet circa 1995 - 2003 where any site with a batch of keywords could turn up in unrelated searches. Google developed algorithms based on closer scrutiny of relevance and it has been improving ever since. Looking to the future (and I have reason to believe this is already happening), the SEO person involved will be assessed by Googlebot within its algorithm. The clever spider will associate projects and names with the history of work and the total written works published online by the author for SEO purposes. This will allow spiders to give more credence to White Hat practitioners who have clean campaigns and less to those SEOs who are trying to deceive the search engines or those who are pumping out mediocre fluff that is being presented as valuable content. Coasting on quantity of links alone won't work in the future; a clean campaign will also need creative high-quality content and honest intent to deal with the rapidly-increasing number of competitor sites.