Search Engine Optimization with Content
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a little understood concept that anyone with a website absolutely must know about. Without optimizing their site, they are running the risk of never fully making it to the first pages of search engines like Google and Yahoo!. Instead they are left scratching their heads and wondering why they have such an amazing site that only gets a few hits per day. Here are the three most important components of SEO, by using them you can be sure to move up in the ranks and have more people finding you in no time.
Content is King
You have surely heard the phrase before that content is king. The reason it is popular is because it is true. You can have the nicest looking website in the world, but without content the search engines don’t know what to look for. Your first step in boosting your SEO value is to get a lot of well written content onto your site. But keep in mind that not all content is created equal.
Search engines are getting smarter. Or rather the programmers who write the algorithms are getting smarter. In order to weed out the spam and keep the legitimate sites near the top of the ranks, they need to know which website is “for real” and which one is just throwing up a bunch of junk to boost their ranks. To do so they look at a few things:
Content Length – Writing 100 words on a topic will help, but not nearly as much as if you flush out the details. 300 or more words will do a lot more good for your website. I always try to get at least 500 words into each page of content that I write.
Originality – If you copy someone else’s work, you are actually doing more harm than good for your site. The crawlers (that is automated programs that search through websites and compile the results on the search engines) will notice that you have plagiarized content. While a few sentences in a quote really won’t hurt you, multiple pages surely will. You will actually go down in the ranks.
Keywords – Keywords are what you want the search engine to find. For instance, the keywords in this post are “Search Engine Optimization.” This keyword string is heavily used on other sites. That means I have a lot of competition. When you choose your keyword, you can run your article through a keyword density tool. Try to keep your density between 1% and 3% for the best results. More than that and the search engines think you are “stuffing” your content.
Links – Just pounding out a bunch of opinion will help your search engine optimization a little, but doing some actual research, and linking out to other websites, will provide better results. I like to link to Wikipedia because it is quick, but you will want to make sure to use different URL’s. So if I go to Wikipedia at the beginning of the page, I will link to an entirely different site later in the page.
Headers – Providing a big bulk of text is not only hard to read, but it’s also hard for the crawlers to find your topics. By providing headers, even like the bullet points on this list, the crawlers can quickly determine the topics of your page and rank it accordingly.
Optimizing Your Searches
I originally started this post as a single page. But I am already over 500 words, so instead of making a huge page of content, I am breaking this into 3 sections. It will not only be easier to read, but it will also help boost my site’s search engine optimization by having three pages of content with the same topic.
Writing content can be a lot of work. And it is especially difficult if you have a business to run and you can’t sit in front of the computer all day. That is why there are people like me. I love to write, and I want to write for your website. I know SEO, and I know how to create written content that will bring more people to your website, and ultimately more clients. Email me today to find out how my website content development can help your business.