Search Engine Optimization Basics - Getting the Content Right

The first time I carried out Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was back in 1998. Back then things were so much simpler than they are now. Essentially all you had to do was put the keywords on the bottom of every page and with little other effort it was inevitable that you would get a substantial amount of traffic to your site.

Nowadays the web is so much larger which effectively means there are more competitor web sites around. However that is only half the story. With the advent of patented technology such as Page Rank, and search engines being more clever about how they undertake indexing and attributing importance to each page, life is a lot more complicated.

However it should be remembered that many of the methods used (or assumed to be used as most search engine companies keep their methodologies a closely guarded secret) have one purpose in mind, to give results to the user that the user will find useful and relevant.

With that in mind, it should be blatantly obvious to any person, especially a so called expert, that website content is going to be the most significant factor. If you think and contemplate this fact for a while you will realise that no matter how many articles you write, how many social networking links you create, if the target site has no content then you are not going to rank anywhere, if indeed your pages get indexed.

However it is not just content that search engines like and love to index, it's specifically original content. The mechanics of search engines nowadays involve removing a lot of duplicated content from their indexes. Back in the late 90's it was quite common for a search query to produce search results from different sites all containing almost exactly the same content. Nowadays, the first ten search results will differ as identical pages are removed from the main indexes. So if you want your site to rank well the conclusion is that not only do you need good content for your website, you need original content.

Only once you have created original content for your website can you really start thinking about Search Engine Optimization techniques and the rules to follow. The first of these rules is surprisingly frequently broken by people with little experience - making sure that all page on the site can be indexed by web search engines spider. Next is making sure that the text on the page is readable. Many web designers who come from a graphic design background place the text into an image file. The reason behind this is that it saves the designer worrying about having to create the style and layout they want using html and CSS. Whilst the site may look nice, the major issue with this is that search engines don't read the text in images (although undoubtedly this will change in future as text recognition software becomes more flexible and accurate).

If you concentrate on the content as the first part of an SEO campaign you will find that you will be a long way down the road to success rather than struggling with an uphill battle.

The author of this article has recently blogged on Search Engine Optimization and works for a web design company called Switchplane. Established in 2002, Switchplane Ltd is a Sussex Web Design company operating in the South East of the UK.

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