In SEO, Content is King

June 11, 2009
Rob Ackerman

While a beautiful, flashy website my intrigue your users once they are there, SEO will actuall bring them there. If you take away all of the flash, video, ajax and such, what do you have left? For SEO purposes whats left is considered content. It's the text that is on the page and it's what the search engines are going to index.

The best way to get the search engines to direct people to your site is to have your site actually contain good content. A search engine is in the business of taking their users and matching them up with the most expert sites on the word or phrase the searcher typed into the search box. Search engines look at your pages in terms of expertness. The more of an expert you appear on a subject the higher you will rank for queries on that subject. The more relevant, useful content you have on a page, the more you look like an expert.

When writing content for your pages, be sure to keep the most important content towards the top. Normally you would try and intrigue the user and give them small bits and make them read the whole article. This is *NOT* the way for SEO and web writing. In SEO, keywords that are closer to the top are weighted heavier, and with the vast amount of information available through Search Engines you need to give the user the pertinent information right away, or they will go to the next search result.

SEO friendly content will also incorporate heading tags (<H1> - <H5>), strong <strong> and bold <b> tags, and links to other expert sites, all the while utilizing the keywords and phrases that you want to rank for. Although you need to include your keywords multiple times, be careful not to "stuff keywords. You won't fool Google and will, most likely, be penalized for it.

Many companies often make the "lack of content" mistake on their product pages. Having only a small blurb, image and pricing on your product page isnt enough. The difference between your potential customer visiting your site and your competitor is having content on every page. Provide useful information that your customer would most likely be searching for while shopping.

As a final note, good useful content will build inbound links. The best way to obtain quality links is to give people something worth linking to.