Best Practices

I’ll cut right to the chase. The key to search engine optimization is content. You can try to “trick” search engines with keyword stuffing, doorway pages, and cloaking; but the best you can hope for with those approaches is a short-term increase in search engine rankings. Google (and all of the other major engines) are constantly refining the algorithms they use to rank search results. The bulk of these changes center around removing pages that have used manipulations to artificially inflate their scores.

So what kind of pages do the search engines want to see at the top of search results? Pages with a lot of focused content. A site like Google will only remain popular as long as it returns relevant results for the searches that visitors enter. When someone goes to a search engine, there is a question to which they are seeking an answer. The types of pages most likely to answer the question: ones with focused content. So unscrupulous (and short-sighted) web entrepreneurs may use the latest scheme to trick Google into ranking their pages higher than your informative, high-content pages; but the search giant is constantly tweaking how their system operates to get your site to the top of their results. Once you’ve written one content-based page, you can move onto something else. Schemers attempting to game the system, must constantly work to find new tricks to keep their pages ranked high as Google methodically disables the old ones. For them a page is never really finished.

Another advantage of the content-based approach is that you aren’t writing just for a machine. It’s important that search engine bots are able to read and evaluate your web pages, but ultimately it is humans who are going to be clicking (or not clicking!) on the buy button. Your copy should be written with the intent of converting a casual visitor into a paying customer. If you strained to squeeze in a particular keyword in every other sentence, your text won’t flow and your conversion rate will suffer.

I don’t mean to imply content is not the only element of a good SEO strategy. Inbound links, valid HTML, cascading style sheets, well-formed URLs, compelling page titles, and other techniques will make a difference in your rankings. Pay attention to those techniques, but your foundation should always be your content. Provide valuable information and services to your web visitors. The search traffic will follow.

Google actually makes things very easy for webmasters. They publish a set of guidelines to make sure your site will remain attractive to the Google algorithm on a long term basis.