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Search Engine Optimization: Content is Key

Every hour, every minute, virtual robotic spiders crawl the pages of the World Wide Web, searching for new or modified web pages. It's the spiders that apply the complex algorithms used by each search engine to decide where your web page will rank in search results. No matter how bad your arachnophobia, if you want your website to show up in the search results, you need to feed the spiders well.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a series of techniques—some legitimate, some less so—for improving the chance that a website will receive top ranking for relevant searches. This is sometimes referred to as achieving "natural" or "organic" search results (in contrast to paid search, such as Google AdWords).

SEO Tricks Are No Treat

Search engine optimization is often thought of as involving "tricks." Things like "fooling" the spiders with pages of words that only they can see (i.e. words that are the same color as the background). That trick hasn't worked for quite a while. If you use it, your site will actually be removed from the search results.

The software experts at Google, Yahoo and the other major engines put a lot of hours into identifying SEO games. Then they jigger the search algorithms so the games don't work—and punish the game players by making their sites invisible to searchers.

There are legitimate techniques for making your site "digestible" to the spiders, but they are not deceptive or "spammy."

Copy is Key

Search engine spiders are programmed to rank a web page on the basis of what it appears to be about. The best way to tell the spiders what your site is about is to include plenty of relevant copy.

In relevant copy, phrases that your target audience might search on should naturally come up repeatedly, increasing your ranking in those areas.

Every page of content that is valuable to your audience is another chance for a web surfer to find your site. Those pages can include articles, white papers or newsletters (Google even "crawls" PDF files, although using these may be sub-optimal). If your site is heavy on images and light on copy (common with designers and artists), consider supplementing those visuals with reasonable amounts of descriptive copy.

Links from other websites are another key factor in SEO. That's a topic for another newsletter.

Stay Balanced

It's easy to conclude that if natural repetition of a phrase helps with search engine rankings, saturating the page with the phrase is even better. That may be true from an SEO viewpoint—but remember that you also want your website to be readable and interesting when people get there.

When web copy includes a certain phrase repeatedly, or uses a certain phrase in every possible place, or employs a certain phrase as a constant refrain, or circles around to a certain phrase over and over again, or keeps featuring a certain phrase—it's boring, and users won't stick around.

So don't clutter web pages, or the website, with meaningless duplication or filler. Instead, fill the site with well-written copy that your target audience will value, so you not only drive traffic with search results, you get results from the traffic you drive.