Hot SEO Trend for 2017, the rise of 'dense content'

Beverly Level X³

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December 7, 2016, 5:00 am

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Hot SEO Trend for 2017, the rise of 'dense content'

Some are saying the newest SEO trend for 2017 is 'dense content', versus the mega 10,000 word posts you see on a lot of these top sites.

Basically, it's where you take all the best information from a news story or topic and condense it down into the briefest form so the reader gets a lot of good, perceived value in a little bit of time.

This new SEO trend for 2017 is based on the ever decreasing attention span of internet at large as people demand to learn more, in less time.

The thinking is that you can have a 3000 word post and still not say as much as you could if you distilled all that info down into a more concise step by step guide or tutorial.

Just for me, I don't think this trend will actually replace the long form guides as these are timeless and usually contain way more information than just the central topic and in that way endure in search engine results.

However, I think there is a good basis for summarizing the relevant points of these longer guides and maybe placing that synopsis (step by step/bullet-points) at the start of a discussion/guide so the person hitting your page can see at a glance your main points.

I'm not saying, cut out the long content as long posts are still proven to rank very well if not above all others. However, making it easier for your reader to get at your point is going to weigh heavily in your favor.

If you can give your reader a lot of information in a short time, help them learn a new technique or method, that's going to keep them coming back for more.

And, in an internet glutted daily with warmed up news, all saying the same thing from site to site, this could potentially set your site out as unique.

What are your thoughts about 'dense content' and whether or not it will replace the longer content/guides we're all so accustomed to seeing on the 'big SEO' sites. Could this give all the tutorial sites a big boost? How are you going to be integrating this into your own SEO/writing?

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anwebservices

To be honest, i like this new trend and i hope it will work good for me. I am not the best in writing long long articles, but also i don't even like to read them. For some reason i like it short and simple, but straight to the point articles or even videos (as i mentioned in some discussion minutes ago). I bet i am not alone, many of people who searching for something would rather read short post with exact answer or info they need, then reading all bla bla and sometime don't even get the answer.
News are different and they can be more detailed. But tutorials and kind of question / answer posts would be great to keep short. In this case, i guess my blog is going to get more value and traffic from Google because most of my articles are short, but with valuable information

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Lynne

Thanks Bev. I wasn't aware of this trend towards dense content. I really like this idea a lot and it could come in really handy for a lot of websites.

You know what ticks me off? All these long posts where people waffle on and on trying to fill in spaces and get a word count in. You can see it immediately.

How about making one post that is really short and condensed, giving all the main points only. Then you have an opportunity to create a longer post for each individual point for those people that want all the additional information?

This will mean more internal links between relevant content, plus an opportunity to hit both long content and dense content.

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EliteWriter

That's very interesting, and as a writer I would welcome this trend of course I think that there is a need for long articles just as much as before, because they help in ranking, and you can include detailed information within a 1000+ word article. However, there are surely a considerable number of readers who prefer summaries or overviews, that they can read through within a couple of minutes. Life is hectic and people are busier than ever, and I truly believe that this could result in site owners who want a long article + a shorter version of it so as to strike the right balance in both areas.

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Beverly

Completely agree on this one. Reddit is famous for the TLDR and it's an idea more of us can adopt, maybe like a summary passage at the start of article that summarizes where we are going, the main ideas/concept we are trying to convey.

On reddit, tldr is the subreddit serving as the site's daily recap. Long posts on reddit are also frequently followed or preceded by a summary, consisting of a sentence or brief paragraph, that is prefixed by the phrase "TL;DR", and the abbreviation is sometimes used as a noun denoting such a summary, as in "Please include a TL;DR along with your post".

source

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Lynne

Beverly at the risk of sounding stupid what does TL; DR stand for?

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Beverly

Too long didn't read. A TL;DR allows the reader to jump to the summary or abbreviated version of the content, and gain instant understanding of what's being said, rather than spending a half hour reading a page long post.

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Cristian

I think its all about the structure nowadays. You don't need to write for people. You need to write for people that "scan" and people that don't like reading, that's how you should approach the content of the future.

Sure, things are changing fast, a long time ago it was favorable to have multiple topics on the same topic then until recently we needed to write big pieces of content containing as much information as possible on that topic.
And now we just need to summaries stuff for people to digest more easily. I think online content is heading in the right direction, the problem is implementing these new trends and making them work, it won't be easy and we need to figure out when and what to summaries and what to expand on.

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Beverly

Helping the reader learn a lot in a little time - condensing it into a compact form so it's more easily digestible, rather than a sea of words. I think this is an SEO trend we'll all benefit from. However, I can see the other side of it, where some will say this will lead back in the direction of thin content when in fact, this trend has nothing to do with 'thin' and more to do with saying the same thing in a better way, fewer words and getting to the point faster for the convenience of the reader. A lot of us are reading on mobile devices and don't want to scroll for pages and pages to learn just that one or two things in a post. I'm still in favor of the long content but think it's good to summarize it for the reader up front, so they know where you are going, much like a table of contents would do.

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Lynne

So bullet points will be big then? I really love reading things in bullet point lists instead of having it written out, especially when I am learning something. I think this will go down great with tutorial type content.

I do agree with you though that when content creators catch on to this trend that they may start writing then content but i do believe that Google will have thought of this and has some sort of way of weeding out the rubbish from the quality dense content posts.

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Corzhens

My understanding of dense content is a summary of a write up like a news report in your example that you will compress into 1 page from the original 5 pages. I like that style of writing because I hate to read content that is just going around in circles but there was nothing added to the main gist. In fact, I had commented on one post in a discussion in this forum that the long article he had posted had nothing much to say about the topic. It was just like a play on words that was going round and round.

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