How to write content that search engines will adore
Friday, 8 February 2008
How to write content that search engines will adore
It’s no secret – search engine’s love content.
When it comes to textual content, it’s important to make your copy as topically relevant as possible so search engine algorithms clearly understand what a particular page is all about.
Always remember, you must write your copy for humans first, and search engines second.
In order to do your SEO efforts justice, you should follow the normal steps of search engine optimisation.
Step 1. Keyword research
Use your Google AdWords account, use keyword tools and brainstorm. This will provide you with the most popular keywords and key phrases relating to the web page you are about to optimise. Create a priority short list of around three key phrases per page that are thematically similar.
Step 2. On-page optimisation
Now that you have two or three priority keywords and key phrases, you need to integrate them into your meta “header data” and page text.
Header data includes title tags, meta content description tags and meta keyword tags.
Google places emphasis on where the keywords are located in your title tags and meta tags, so try and place your keywords as close to the beginning of your title tag and meta content tags as possible.
Ideally you should place your brand name at the end of your title tag and let the priority key phrases do the heavy lifting. “Get found first; brand and sell second.” If people already knew about you and your products or services they’d go straight to your website!
Next, place your most important keyword into your “Heading 1” tag. If you have heading 2s and 3s, then place the other priority key phrases in those where practicable.
In the opening paragraph of your body text, use the most important priority key phrase at least once. Don’t go overboard as you may be penalised for “spamming” if you go too far. Integrate your other priority key phrases into your text where possible. Keep your keyword density at less than 7%.
Use this tool to check if you’re concerned you’re going too far with your optimisation.
If you have a single page with content about, for example, Php programming, Microsoft.NET programming and C+ programming, then you’re diluting the content. Split the content out into three new pages, each dedicated solely to the unique topical content.
Step 3. Anchor text optimisation
Creating descriptive internal links is very important. www.wikipedia.org does a very good job at this. Hardly any traffic moves through its navigation system at all. Most people navigate by clicking on links embedded within the content. Search engine robots do the same.
Once you have finished your initial on-page optimisation (step 2), revisit all pages and create descriptive links to other pages where appropriate.
Example.
If you have optimised a webpage about Australia and have optimised the page for “Travel to Australia”, then consider changing links which might read “click here for more information about Australia” to “Travel to Australia – it’s great!”
Google’s robot will “read” your new anchor link text before following the link. It will find relevant copy on the destination page, creating a strong relevance “match”. This can help the site rank higher at Google (and other search engines).
Good luck!
Chris Thomas heads Reseo a search engine optimisation company which specialises in setting up and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns, Affiliate Programs and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.
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Comments
Sandy Naidu writes: Good article. I have found alt tags to be quite helpful as well. We don't need to keyword stuff them but with a bit of thinking we can definitely make use of them to help our rankings.
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