Good Quality Content Always Comes First

The starting point for all websites must be the good quality content – this is why people visit your website and search engines attempt to index your website based on its content. Search engines are quickly enhanced to overcome any tricks people use in an attempt to fool them. All practices that give false results are actively combated. So the first key to search engine success is real content, well crafted. This is the most likely route to long term success. With this in mind here are some starting points to think about building your content from:

Spend time on this – you want to provide a website with quality content that is of value to visitors and to your company. Getting visitors to your website is only the first objective – when they are there it needs to have been worth the effort. Then you might meet your objectives for the website.

Good quality content means useful, well crafted text that your human website visitors want to read. A good quantity of useful content is better than a small amount. The content must be written for the human website visitor with slight amendments to help the automated search engine spiders.

The aim of search engines is to provide the most relevant results to your search enquiry. The main way the search engines attempt to do this by examining the text content of the pages it can find looking for keyword phrases.

You can read more on the subject of writing good quality content on the epsilis website.

Some pointers on the differences between writing copy for the human reader and writing copy for search engines

The whole idea is to write for the search engines AND the human website visitors. To write for the search engine first is the wrong approach because it is the human visitors that use the website, the search engines are just vehicles to get the human visitors to the website.

However there are a few common good practices applied to writing for human readers that need to be adjusted a little to get the best out of search engines. However at the end of the process things the copy (or content) needs to work for the human reader. If it doesn't they are likely to think less of your web site and may well go elsewhere. If this happens the search engine optimisation (SEO) effort has been wasted.

Compared to the human reader the search engine prefers

Search engines attach more importance to words found in page titles, headings, links and early paragraphs so put your key words in these.

Remember however the content is for the human visitor so make sure that it reads well and still focusses on it's main purpose.

Next : >> Key Words, Keyword Phrases and Search Queries