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Web Hosting Articles >> Content and RankingsContent and RankingsAuthor: Rosemarie WiseAdded: December 31, 1969 Views: 2,182 Rating: 2/10 No one likes a search engine spammer. Not only do they dilute the rankings, but they damage the usefulness of the results and the reputation of the search engines. Thankfully, the old tricks that were used to get that top spot are starting to fail as more and more search engines and their robots penalize sites that are using unethical ways of achieving rankings. It isn't because the search engines have gotten wise to the methods used by the spammers that they are becoming less successful in their spam attempts, its something much more simple than that. Visible site content is more important than ever before when fighting for that number one position in the popular search engines, and it is getting increasingly difficult to convince them that a page is something it obviously isn't! Content is King If it's been said once, it's been said a thousand times. Content is important to your site, the reason is quite simple really; the only way to know what a page is about is to actually read the text you can see! Graphics may be important to the page, but ultimately it is the words that you use that build up the bulk of your site content (and if you don't have many words on your site you don't really have much quality content, unless your site is an image gallery!). It's pointless trying to cheat the search engine spiders by techniques such as page cloaking, redirection and hidden text; even if you did manage to get a good position in the rankings, your visitors wouldn't be happy to visit the site and learn that you have nothing on that page they were looking for!. If you have a links page and it isn't too cluttered already, then it is certainly worth having another look at the words you use to create and describe the links. I've had people come to my site from Google as a direct result of the description that I've given my links, and because I open all my external links in a new window, there is a chance they might stay and have a better look around the rest of my site. Making use of Keywords It should come as no surprise to learn that some keywords are searched for more than others, and you could use this to your advantage if only you had some idea of which words do better than others. There are several programs out there that can help you find this information out for yourself; Good Keywords is the one that immediately springs to my mind. One common mistake often made by sites trying to sell their products is that they are too specific with the keywords that they try to target. If you were selling a new product (for example an image editor), then why waste time focusing on the name of the product? If your potential customers don't know the name of it, how can they find you? It is much better to use keywords that describe what it does (e.g. "image editor") than the actual name of it. By all means establish your brand, but it shouldn't be the main focus of your keywords; your product name should appear enough on the site to ensure it is found if it is searched for. Once you know the most commonly searched words on your chosen topic, you can use this to your advantage and build your content around those words; after all, if more people are searching for a word you are likely to have better results from it. It may seem a rather strange idea, but if you are struggling to know what sort of things people are wanting to read it's just one way of finding out. You shouldn't forget that your navigational links are also an integral part of your sites content and so should make use of your keywords whenever possible. In some cases the navigational elements are the only visual elements that link various pages together, and so are important to help create a theme for your site. Site Themes Search engines that use themes are becoming increasingly common. To find out the best theme for a site, they spider all the pages and look for common topics; you would expect a site about cars to have more than a single page talking about cars. Themes play an important role in ranking on some of the more advanced search engines as they are yet another way of assessing the usefulness of a particular site. Personal pages that are just a collection of various interests can find it more difficult to get the attention of the search engines that use themes quite heavily. Each new unrelated topic you add to a site will only dilute the overall theme on a site, and if you are serious about getting new visitors to a particular part of your site then you should consider separating it into its own web space. Getting the Attention Sometimes the best way of getting the attention of search engines is to just concentrate on your site's content! Stick to a few keywords that are relevant to a topic for each of your pages and build them into the content naturally. Making good use of your HTML tags can help to focus the search engines on particular words or phrases; if your content is important, put it in a header tag and change the style using a style sheet if you need to. There is a growing trend for the search engines to focus on the one thing that they should have focused on from the start; the entire content of the page and the role it plays on the site as a whole. Your content really is your site's most useful asset! Talk about this article in the webmaster forums! More Promoting and Marketing Articles |
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