- About This Series
- SEO: The Black Art?
- Content Is King: Get Those Keywords
- Content Is King: Keep Content Relevant
- The Importance of Outside Links
- A Checklist
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Content Is King: Keep Content Relevant
If your marketing department did a good job of covering a variety of niches for your product, service, or organization, the pages that were written for these market niches will be relevant to your targeted keyword phrases. Including your targeted keywords on pages such as Products, Services, or Mission goes a long way in helping your organization's web site rise to the top of the search results. This is called relevancy. Search engines assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.
Another major factor used by search engines to determine relevancy is frequency. A search engine analyzes a web page to determine how often keywords appear in relation to other words in the page. Pages with a higher frequency of the targeted keywords are seen by search engines as being "more relevant" than those of competitors.
Here's a list of other good tips to help you focus your pages on content that will get noticed by search engines:
Don't forget your site logs! Your site logs should point out popular pages that have high value to visitors; the copy from those pages should be used to create relevant content—and even improve your targeted keyword phrases.
Limit the graphics. Resist your marketing department's request to use a lot of graphics on a web page. It looks pretty, but search engines can't read graphics. Use HTML text whenever possible. Use those <ALT></ALT> tags. But get the relevant content straight first—then add the graphics.
Break up long pages into multiple pages organized by topic. Suppose you have a long page about buying tires. One section covers what to look for in buying a tire. Another discusses how tires are made. Another presents a comparison table between different types of tires. This all creates a rather long page; consider having your marketing staff break it up. Why? For readability and download time, of course, but also to help your site show up in search engines. For search engine purposes, it would be wise to break that long page into three different pages, so that each of the new pages is more firmly focused on one of these subtopics—thus offering search engines more relevant content and you the opportunity to create more targeted keywords for each page.
Be careful of edits. If your site is redone, your copywriters might edit the content of the new pages and in the process reduce its relevancy. For example, copy that once read discount antique car tires may be shortened to read simply discount tires. Your page may be all about antique car tires, but editing reduced content relevancy.
Watch out for tables. Tables can push your relevant text down the page, making keywords less relevant because they appear "lower" on the page. For example, suppose you have a two-column web page—copy on the right, navigation links on the left. When search engines read the page, they read the table first, and then the copy containing your keyword-loaded text. This is because tables break apart when search engines read them. I know, tables are unavoidable. But keep in mind how they will affect your efforts at SEO.
Place JavaScript carefully. Large sections of JavaScript can have the same effect as tables. The search engine reads this information first. If possible, put your script further down on the page.
Go for static pages. Some search engines can't index pages generated via CGI or database-delivery. Create static pages whenever possible—perhaps using the database to update the pages rather than generating them on the fly.