Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the Series – Part II: Content is King

In Part I of this Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Series, we looked at the importance of using a unique and accurate title tag, a good description, and appropriate keywords and phrases in your HTML code within the head tags of your site as the first phase of optimizing your website for the search engines.

Although being found by the search engines (SEs) is key to increasing traffic to your website, equally important is the content of your site, which is what those visitors will see once they find you, and the topic of today’s post.  It is too easy to get caught up in pleasing the search engines and forget that the ultimate goal of our website is to provide valuable information to our visitors.

With that in mind, follow these rules of thumb to keep your visitors happy and encourage them to bookmark your site for repeat visits.  And remember, it takes between 15-30 seconds for someone to decide whether your site is what they’re looking for.  Good content and design are crucial to people and the SE “bots” that will be crawling your site.

Hyperlinks

For those of us who are expert website users, it can be easy to forget that not everyone who surfs the web knows how to navigate it.  To avoid confusion, use an easy-to-understand hyperlink system with a clear hierarchy of static text links.  When a user clicks your “About Us” page, for instance, make it easy for him/her to find your home page again or navigate to a different page within your site.  To that end, using picture links or assuming visitors know to click your logo to go back to the home page is not a good idea.  In addition, don’t overwhelm your visitors with too many hyperlinks.

Content

Create a content-rich site using (but not overusing) your keywords.  Write clearly and concisely and always write for the reader.  Avoid using “I” and “me” sentences and instead speak to what your visitors care about most – what’s in it for them.

It is important to note that while you write, think about words and phrases your visitors might have used to find your website and be sure to include them, again, without overusing them, on each page of your site.  Search engines love that.

Keep It Simple

Using great graphics or fancy coding like Java script and Flash might make your website appear snazzy, but to a search engine, it’s just unnecessary noise.  Keep this to a minimum and remember that search engines don’t recognize text within images.  As a compromise, you can use the “ALT” attribute to describe your images.  However, text is best.

Heading Tags

Another way to achieve higher search engine rankings is to apply tags to the headings on your web pages.  The most important headings should get an <h1> tag, while the least important should get an <h6> tag.  Although your visitors don’t see these tags, headings with an <h1> tag will appear larger in font size than lower-level tags.  See below for an example:

<h1> This is an h1 level tag. </h1>

<h6> This is an h6 level tag. </h6>

To make this method effective, be sure to include prime keywords and phrases in your headings.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are not only important to your visitors, allowing them to quickly find a page containing the information they are looking for, but they are important to search engines as well.  They act like the index of a book and make it much easier for the search engine bots to crawl and list your site by page content.  Sitemaps are useful for showing hierarchy within pages as well.

If the thought of creating a sitemap makes your head hurt, try using a sitemap generator like Google’s Sitemap Generator (Beta): http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/.

In the next and final post of this series, I’ll go into detail about submitting your site to the search engines as well as how to monitor your settings to make sure they are working in the best way possible to get your website listed in a highly visible position.