Contents
SEO Basics
How Search Engines Work
How to Choose Keywords for SEO
How to Optimize Your Site for SEO
How to Optimize Your HTML for SEO
How to Optimize Page Content for SEO
How to Get Links to Your Website
How to Get Your Website Included in
Directories and Search Engines
How to Assess the Success of
Your SEO Campaign
SEO Tactics to Avoid
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How to Optimize Page Content for SEO
In addition to assessing the keywords you place within HTML tags, crawlers also consider various aspects of the content that you display to your site’s visitors. Making SEO-friendly page content involves:
- Organizing page content
- Including keywords in page content
- Refreshing page content regularly
Organizing Page Content
Search engine crawlers view your pages very differently from the way human visitors do. Crawlers read your pages from top to bottom and consider all the HTML code that makes up your page, even if it’s invisible to readers. To view your web pages like a search engine crawler:
- Open one of your pages in a web browser, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.
- Right-click a blank spot within your page.
- Select View Page Source or View Source in the menu that appears.
Anything that appears near the top of this source code view will likely be given extra weight by search engines. If your page’s core content does not appear near the top, consider rearranging your code to put the most important content as close to the top as possible.
Below are two examples of changes you can make to promote your core content and relegate less important content to a lower spot in your code or even to a separate file altogether. (Note that you should attempt to make these changes only if you’re familiar with HTML and, ideally, CSS).
- Menus or other navigation elements: Move these as close as possible to the bottom of your code. This doesn’t mean that the actual menus will appear at the bottom of your pages. Using HTML and CSS, you can move the code without affecting where the navigation elements appear on your actual page.
- JavaScript and CSS code: Move these to a separate file and then reference them in your HTML.
Page Length
Crawlers tend to give the most weight to the first 500 or so words of text content on a web page. This means that in addition to putting the most important content first, you should also try to keep the total word count of each page on your site to 500 words or fewer. With this approach, you increase the likelihood that crawlers will consider all the content on each page, rather than just the first half of a 1,000-word page, for instance.
Including Keywords in Page Content
If your keyword list contains 100 or more keywords and phrases, you can’t possibly include all those keywords on each page. Instead, focus each page on the few keywords and phrases most relevant to that page’s main topic. For
example, a page on poodle trimming might include keywords such as poodle trimming, trimmers, and trim your standard poodle in its text and headings, but it probably wouldn’t include the phrase poodle washing.
Focusing on the 3–5 most relevant keyword phrases per page will keep your pages
focused and search engine friendly. Deliberately flooding your pages with keywords is called keyword stuffing, an unscrupulous practice that can lead search engines to ban your site.
Refreshing Page Content Regularly
Search engines reward sites that have fresh content. Keeping a site up to date can be as simple as adding fresh content regularly, ideally once a week or so at the least. The simplest way to add new content is to post it yourself—by updating your blog or posting a new article, for example. You don’t always need to add fresh content manually, though.
Dynamic Content
You can also use technologies such as Javascript and CGI to update your website automatically at regular intervals. Though the technical implementation of these methods is beyond the scope of this guide, you or someone in your organization may already know how to use these technologies. Here’s an overview of how to update your site’s content dynamically:
- Choose a type of dynamic data you wish to include on your site, such as a news feed or a list of helpful tips related to the main topic of your site.
- Configure your site to include a fresh piece of data on your site’s homepage periodically so that users will likely see new content every time they visit. For example, you could have a feature called “Tip of the Day” in which you offer a new piece of information relevant to your site’s content every day.
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