If you’ve interacted with Marketplace Earth before or probably any SEO firm, you are probably sure to hear the words “unique content” over and over again.  And pending on the size of your site, this can pose a real problem for you.  So, in this post, we want to dig into exactly what constitutes as unique content and why it’s so important.

THE WHAT:

Unique content is basically self defined.  It’s something that you’ve created on your website that is not found anywhere else on the internet.  If you’re getting that uh-oh feeling about all that cut and pasting you’ve done, you should!  Cut and Paste is the enemy of unique content.

You can place unique content into 3 categories:

1.  Editorial – Producing something yourself on your site, hiring out journalists, hiring out copywriters are all ways to create your own editorial content.  This can be done by you or be outsourced.

2.  Machine Built – Something like the results you would see inside Expedia where there is tons of information placed together around data points.  They compile a lot of info in unique fashions.  This is scalable, but you have to be careful with this.  The engines may be able to discover that this is not truly unique.

3.  UGC – (User Generated Content) – In the opinion of many SEOs, this is the best kind of content, but it’s tough to generate.  You want to be able to build a community and figure out how to get people to do this for free.  Think of how powerful and scalable this can be – YouTube, Reddit, Digg.  If you can create this, go for it.

THE WHY:

1. The Search Engines Want Unique Results – Is it because they are jerks?  No.  Unique results help their users.  Think about it.  If you are looking for “Halloween costumes” online and you find the same thing again and again and again, you’re going to get very frustrated.  This happens in the travel world web sites a lot.  And by the way, the search engines are VERY good at identifying what’s unique and what is not.

2.  It Creates Value for Your Users – The search engines want to give proper credit to the citation source, and they want different results on their SERPs.

3.  Higher Rankings – This is really the one that matters.  Unless you are able to create unique content on your site, you will never be able to rank well.

So, there is a bit of the what, why and how.  Think through these above ways of How to create unique content and decide what makes most sense for your organization.