Ranking Factors for SEO - Content Quality
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I don't think search engines can really tell the quality of the document directly, assuming all other factors (inbound links, internal links, etc) are not counted. If you take two documents of the same length, on the same topic, one written by a 10th grader who knows nothing about the topic and was given 30 minutes to research it, and the other by an expert who spent 15 years in the field, can search engines really spot a difference? Assuming, of course, that there are no other clues.
There's the LSI and language pattern analysis, but I don't believe search engines put too much weight on this factor.
Quality content is great for one-way links. When people see quality they link to it, so it's a killer technique for link building, but I don't think search engines can tell the difference without other indicators, at least for now.
Grammar
Misspelled keywords are part of the PPC economy. Microsoft even has the Keyword Mutation Detector tool (who was the smart guy that came up with that name?) that spots misspelled keywords and help advertisers bid.
I don't think search engines really care about proper spelling, but we haven't tried ranking misspelled pages.
Do your grammar check in Word, Firefox, Dreamweaver or any other application. Open Office is free, and it features a great spell checker. The grammar is more of a user experience issue than a search engine issue.
Amount of Content
We ranked many sites with little content, including those with Flash. This is a factor in the overall relevancy computation, but not a deciding one. If external links can make up for having relatively little content, than it's okay to have a somewhat small amount of content on your pages.
You may miss many long tail searches (which send a lot of traffic) if there's little content. It's also easier to get one-way links if there's some killer content on your pages.
Validation
As long as the code doesn't prevent or stop bots from spidering, validation doesn't matter.
It does create more jobs in the SEO field, however, so for this sake let's say that validation matters to search engines.
Number of Folders
The number of folders is represented with a slash in the URL. Example: www.site.com/folder/folder/folder/folder/page.html
Spiders can crawl deeply into the web, and it is the commercial interest of the search engines to make sure they have all the content. If a page is within many folders, but has many external and internal links, it probably doesn't matter.
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