TAMPA, FLORIDA– Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, recently addressed in one of his most recent videos the value of content over search engine optimization.

According to Cutts, you can have great content on your site and be completely lacking in good SEO, yet your site still could rank well on Google.

Ali Husayni, CEO of Master Google and our resident SEO expert, agrees.

“Great content will attract inbound links by its nature, and sites that constantly write great content attract visitors and Google spiders as well,” Ali says. “Google ranks old and new pages of these sites above their competitors – thus removing the need for out-of-the-box or black hat SEO.”

That’s what Cutts is referring to, he says. Being an SEO expert is not mutually exclusive of being great at content development. A person can possess a great deal of knowledge about all of the little SEO nuances that help optimize a site and make it friendly for Google spiders. But a Google spider isn’t going to purchase your product or service. You need human traffic to come to your site. And once they visit your site, you have to give them a reason to stay and to make a buying decision.

Typically, that is done by providing useful information—good content. Good content is original and relevant. It answers a question, addresses a need and paints you as a subject matter expert.

So while we obviously are big believers in SEO, we also are squarely in Cutts’ corner regarding content. We view SEO and content as being complimentary to one another. That is evident when you consider the makeup of our SEO team here at Master Google, nearly half of which is comprised of expert copywriters.

“Great content also needs great SEO to get ranked better,” Husayni says.

Being aware of what people’s interests are plays hand-in-hand with writing great content. For example, if you run a shoe manufacturing facility, but you’re unaware of what styles of shoes customers want, you will lose your business to your market-aware competitor. Whether SEO helps our writers understand what to write, or how to write it in a fashion that gets the content indexed, one thing is for certain: it helps people find that great content.

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A brief explanation on what works and doesn’t work for Google…

SEO for Google consists of three main parts: optimization, content, and popularity. By understanding these factors in Google SEO, you can rank any Web site at the top of the search results.

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• What is Google looking for when indexing and ranking your Web site?
• Why is site X ranking number one while your site ranks on the fifth page?
• Site X is not even a good site, so why does Google think it’s better than yours?
• Is it even possible to rank your site above site X?

Google SEO is not magic. Google doesn’t favor any site over the others without clear and measurable calculations. But what are these calculations?

Matt Cutts, Google’s anti-spam guru and SEO spokesman, has said numerious times that Googlebots, or Google Spiders, evaluate over 200 criterium to identify which site should be ranked above the others. In other words, there is a clear formula that these Mega software follow and score each Web page by, assigning each site a number. This secret number sometimes correlates with Page Rank- a number from 1 to 10 given to each Web page by Google- but not always.

The list of what Google looks for on your Web page is secret, but I have narrowed down the most important factors to be what’s written on the site, optimization and inbound links. In other words:

Content + Relevancy + Popularity = Top of Google Rankings

Google’s job is to show search results for any keywords you look for. It is true that Google looks at your Web page as a whole, but, in reality, it’s mostly interested in the content of your site (i.e. text, videos, images).

You might ask “what should I change so that Google likes my content?”

The simplified answer is have lots of original, relevant and fresh content without any grammatical errors. This will support your efforts to attract inbound links.

Original Content

The most important factor is to have original content. When it comes to Google, content that is copied from other sites is a big no-no. I have seen many sites get flagged and unindexed by Google for simply having duplicate content. To protect your site if you have original content, search for it on Google to find possible sites that have copied your content. Sometimes Google makes the mistake of degrading sites with original content because others have copied it.

If you cannot keep up with those that tend to copy your text, you can solve this issue by rewriting your homepage content once a month. That way, you can ensure that you have original content at all times.

Fresh Content

Blogs and news sites are good examples of sites that have fresh content on a regular basis. But if your site’s content remains the same, it is a good idea to rewrite it at least once a month. Google announced in Nov. 2011 that it is now more interested in fresh content.

Keyword-Rich Content

Having your keywords mentioned within your content is also very important. If your site is about selling shoes, make sure you mention selling shoes or synonymous keywords within your content.

What you should stay away from, however, is repeating your keywords more than once. Google will quickly degrade your site if it feels like you’re trying to manipulate it in order to place you higher on the search engine results.

Clean Copy

If your site has grammatical or spelling mistakes, it will negatively affect your site’s ranking. The best thing to do is to hire an editor to review your site’s content. You can get this done rather cheap, sometimes for just $25 per page.

In the next part of this article, I’ll be focusing on relevancy, another important factor in Google SEO.

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