It doesn’t matter if you perform some dark voodoo to get your site the top place in the results. (Wall)
You’ll still need solid content to back that up since the visitors are going to be leaving pretty quickly if they don’t find what they are looking for.
Your content needs to be useful for the people who you want to find your site.
You need the content to make sense to the reader.
And they must like it to come back.
Having original content is very important.
Don’t expect to just copy–paste some text from another site, throw in some keywords and call it a day.
You need lots and lots of original content with the keywords in the content itself.
If people searching for jQuery come to your page, they expect something related to jQuery to be found on your page.
Throw in relevant keywords within the content of the page. But don’t just spam them.
Your keywords need to be in the appropriate position and of appropriate density. Throw too much keywords around in the content and you are going to be flagged for spam.
How many keywords? It is difficult to find agreement on this.
Suggested ratios range from 4% (Jon Smith)
to 10-15% (IA Institute) or 10 to 15 keywords in every 100 words of content.
Just as important as having original content is having regularly updated content.
Fresh content will bring in people and bots/spiders alike which in turn will let you get your site indexed with much more frequency which will in turn return fresher results to the search results. But don’t update just for the sake of updating.
Proper quality content written by a human is the way to go.
Google Starter Guide to SEO by Google
Links
Google Webmaster Tools
Google support
View the PDF of the Google Starter Guide.
Slide 15 of the presentation SEO and IA: The Makings of a Beautiful Friendship
Prepared for the 2007 IA Summit:Las Vegas
By Marianne Sweeney
Links
Slideshow IA Institute Summit
Get into Bed with Google
by Jon Smith
Jensense.com‘s Jennifer Slegg spoke at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in London about the importance of excellent content for maximizing traffic via the long tail of search.
‘Long tail search is less competitive and it narrows the market.‘
Marketers don‘t focus on the so-called ‘long tail‘ realm of keywords because keywords become less popular. Slegg believes building long-term website traffic comes from providing unique content. Unique content improves the site‘s chances of placing high in search ranking for lesser–used keywords and keyword combinations that together bring more traffic.
Slegg believes the problem comes from where to find unique content. Slegg warns against pulling articles from free article databases, as they often link to spam–oriented sites, or attempt to sell users products. Slegg wants website owners to know if they buy content, that ‘you get what you pay for.” She says to beware of dishonest writers who resell their articles months later.
Regardless of where the content comes from, though, focusing on the long tail means narrowing the focus of content to become less competitive. For example, instead of optimizing for ‘Valentine–s Day gifts,” narrow down the terms and shoot for ‘Valentines Day gifts for teachers.”
Slegg suggested at the end of the presentation publishing seasonal articles six months ahead of time so that search engines index them by the time people start looking for them.
SEO Book
