subject: Search Engine Optimization - The Importance Of Good Relevant Content [print this page] Search Engine Optimization - The Importance Of Good Relevant Content
Congratulations! You have made the wise choice to leverage the power of search engines to draw more targeted traffic to your web site. This presents a great opportunity to increase visits to your site, and most importantly to boost leads and sales. However, if you do not know the right way to go about optimizing your web site for search engine rankings, you will not see any benefits. Here's a quick look at how to effectively optimize your site.
One of the first places to start the optimization process is with the actual copy on your web site. Probably one of the most important things a search engine uses to determine what terms your site should show up for in the results page is what words are seen on your site. This is a pretty common sense approach - after all, what would be a better indicator of what your site is about than its actual verbiage? However, while this appears to be a logical idea, many sites still miss the mark.
Filling your site with videos and photos may look appealing when done right, but search engines can't READ photos and videos, and if they cannot read it, they cannot categorize it (the process of categorizing is known as "indexing"). So if you want your site indexed for a certain term, you must include that term and variations of it repeatedly on your web site.
Do not read that and think "I will just repeat a term endlessly on my site and gain first overall position by having my target keyword on my site more than anyone else." Search engines have become very sophisticated over the years, and they can see through those tactics. As a rule of thumb, you want to work a term into a page on your web site as often as possible while still retaining a natural feeling while reading through it. So be sure to read over any copy on your site and make sure it doesn't feel awkward because you have stuffed a keyword in too many times.
Something else to keep in mind is that each page of your site represents a different opportunity to rank on search engines, so make sure every page has its own unique, descriptive copy that speaks of the goods or service offered on it. Ideally, you should think about the phrases that best describe what you are offering the public, identify those as your target keywords, and then write all of your copy based around them. That way you will have a common theme in mind and it will be easier to write optimized copy that flows naturally when reading it.
Developing great copy is just the first step in optimizing your web site. There are many other factors which influence how a search engine spider gets around your site and where they reach your site from. But having great, relevant content which is updated regularly goes a long way in helping to achieve top rankings on search engine results pages.
