The most important factors of your website’s search engine visibility are content and quality back links. We’ll discuss back links (links from other sites to your site) in detail in the next post, but for now, let’s compare the value of each of these factors, and clarify some things. Is readable content the most important factor of your website’s search engine visibility? Many SEO’s say yes, and this is generally true, with one caveat: A large number of very high quality back links to a site can offset a lack of content. For example, if a web page had little readable content, but it was featured (along with a direct hyperlink) on the websites of, let’s say, four or five major news organizations like CNN, CSPAN, NBC, FOX, and ABC, the likelihood is that that website would be ranked very highly (for as long as those links existed.) Therefore, it is possible to have a website do well in search engines based solely on high quality back links, despite the fact that it is lacking in content. In fact, we have seen web pages for local businesses do fairly well with only a little content. This can be puzzling, when we are often told how important a factor readable content is in website ranking. When we take a close look at sites that rank well, but have little readable content, we almost always find that they have a number of things in common: 1. They have relevant back links from sites directly related to their industry, and 2. They have been around for a while. (Time is a factor in website ranking.) 3. They are regional, and therefore subject to less competition.
Yes, it is possible to neglect content creation for your website, and focus only on back links. It is theoretically possible to get your website a high ranking based solely on high quality back links from reputable sites. If your business is very well connected and can simply ask that other companies with highly ranked websites link to yours, by all means do it. Most of us don’t have that luxury.
The reality is that, while a very large number of high quality back links may be the best way to get your website ranked highly, content is still a huge factor. And because getting back links from highly ranked websites is a very difficult task, content is probably the most important factor for website ranking in practice. I have seen websites crawl to page one of Google with almost no back links, just because they were packed with relevant, original content.
What can we take away from this discussion of content vs. back links? Do both. Great, original content, and high quality back links are the two biggest factors in the ranking of your website by far. In fact, an SEO strategy essentially comes down to these two things. Create content for your website, and get other websites to link to yours. That’s it. That is SEO in a nutshell.
Content
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they begin to undertake an SEO project is to get caught up in the technical side of search engine optimization, and miss the forest for the trees. Search engines are designed to deliver usable, informative, original content to the end user. One of the reasons Google rose to the top of the search engine ladder is because they developed an algorithm that was really discerning, resulting in search returns that were actually relevant to our queries. Google has continued and will continue to improve this technology, and find ways to exclude pages that are engage technical trickery that is geared solely towards garnering higher rankings . Hence, if we want our websites to rank now and rank forever, we should take their advice, (which they have circulated on the internet in several public statements) and do what they want us to do: Create good websites!
The ideal website for search purposes is full of informative, original content. Search engines read this content. They analyze it. They compare it to other sites on the web. This content is the main element of your on-site optimization. Of course, when we want to get a business site up and ranked in the search engines quickly and with as little up front cost as possible, this content creation can be a real burden, so we are often tempted to short cut it. Don’t. Take the time to create a lot of informative content for your website right up front, and make a habit of adding to it on a fairly regular basis. As search engines become even more sophisticated, they will get better and better at weeding out tactics that are meant to shortcut the natural process of search. So, as far as content goes, make the long term investment and create a website that is substantial, informative, and full of readable text.
Details of Content Creation
Duplicate Content – Avoid using duplicate text and do not steal text from other websites. Search engines will immediately recognize this, and penalize you for it. In a post about duplicate content, a particular author was proposing that it was mathematically impossible for a search engine to compare your site to every single website on the internet, and determine if there was duplicate content, and if so, who created the content first. This seems a reasonable supposition. Comparing every website to every other website would mean that hundreds of trillions of comparisons would have to be carried out. However, I once posted a duplicate blog post on two different blog sites. The second blog site immediately rejected it, telling me that it was a duplicate. Now, this doesn’t mean that this blog site checked every other website in the world…it probably only scanned other popular blog sites, but the lesson was pretty clear. The technology does exist to compare large chunks of text and determine that they are duplicates. In addition, your website will be de-indexed (taken out of search results completely) if you are caught stealing text directly from another site without a citation.
However, I have used duplicate text (with minor substitutions,) in order to create web pages for different cities, and have had success with it. In the post on “Page Titles and Meta Tags, ” I used www.treetrimmingoflosangeles.com as an example of a site for which we created multiple web pages for different cities throughout Los Angeles, in order to bring in customers who were using the name of their city to search (Tree Trimming Beverly Hills, for example.) I simply copied the client’s home page, and duplicated it, inserting the word of the city where appropriate and altering the page title. These page were exact duplicates in every respect except for the name of the city. I got this idea from the website for Crown Limo in Los Angeles. They created duplicate pages for every single city in Los Angeles, substituting only the name of the city in the text, title, and meta-descriptions. These individual pages do pretty well in search engines when people search locally. One reason, of course, is that the competition for a very specific area is significantly diminished, and therefore, even if there is a penalty for duplicate content, there just aren’t that many other websites competing for “Limousine Van Nuys.”
Suffice it to say that, while duplicate pages such as these can be a quick and easy up-front solution to drive city specific (or other kinds of specific traffic) to your site, my guess is that over the long haul, Google will catch on, and find a way to permanently fix this loophole. Or, new websites that DO follow the will pop up in the areas and the sites (like mine) that are simply duplicate pages will get pushed down in the rankings. So, here we need to weight the pros and cons. Is it best to provide original content on every single page? Absolutely. Is it worth it to take the risk, and reduce the upfront cost by just producing duplicates, for say, different cities? Only time will tell. The best method in the long run is to create original content for every page of your website.
Analyzing Keywords – When you write content for your site, you do want to cheat towards the keywords you are trying to target, and work them in as much as possible, even if it sometimes mean sacrificing good prose. If you are a drywall contractor in Los Angeles, and you are targeting the phrase Drywall Contractor Los Angeles, it is probably a good idea to incorporate the phrase “Drywall Contractor in Los Angeles” into the text of your site, even if the phrase ends up being a bit redundant.
That being said, you will probably want a jumping off point for finding words to incorporate into your website’s text. There are a number of tools that can be used to determine what people are actually searching for. The one I tend to use is this:
This site is pretty self explanatory. On the left are common categories. If you click on one of these categories, you will be shown a list of words that people are searching for, along with data about these searches. You can also enter a custom term in the “Words or Phrases” box at the top. You do not need to put anything in the “Website” box.
If you use this tool, you should have a pretty solid list of words and phrases to incorporate into your site, and probably a lot that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. You can download this list, and save it for reference. When you are writing the text for your site, incorporate these terms into your site as much as you can, while still retaining a readable and intelligent writing style.
Anchor Text – Search engines place special emphasis on anchor text. What is anchor text? Anchor text is text that is clickable (it is a hyperlink) and it takes you to another part of the website. This is an example of anchor text: How to Write Page Titles and Meta Tags for Your Website. If you click this, it will take you to an article that is full of keywords related to this subject. In an ideal world, the main key phrases you are hoping to capture exist in the form of anchor text on your home page, and when you click on this anchor text, you are taken to a page that expands on this key phrase, incorporates this key phrase, and utilizes other key phrases that are closely related to it.
For example: If you are a Pluming Contractor in Los Angeles, it would be a good idea to include anchor text on your home page that said, “Los Angeles Plumbing Services,” that took you to a page that was full of readable text about your Los Angeles Plumbing Services. The text of this page would be peppered with words and phrases that you got from your keyword analysis, and your page title (the Title Tag of that web page) would include the phrase “Los Angeles Plumbing Services.”
Again, to re-iterate that very important pattern:
1. Anchor Text With Targeted Phrase (Los Angeles Plumbing Services)
Linking To>
2. A Webpage With Content Related to The Targeted Phrase (We have provided plumbing services, rooter service, drain clean out service in Los Angeles for over twenty years….)
With>
3. A Page Title And Meta Tags That Include These Key Phrases
<title>Los Angeles Plumbing Service | Plumber Los Angeles</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Joe the plumber has provided plumbing services in and throughout Los Angeles…..”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”plumbing, plumber service los angeles, Joe the Plumber, los angeles plumber”>
Readable Text – We say “readable text” because, while the end user can read anything that looks like text, not all text that you see on the internet is actually computer text that search engines can read. Sometimes the text you see on a website is actually a photo file or graphic. Search engines can’t read this. This is very important because a well intentioned but novice web designer may create a page with fonts that look really great, without knowing that search engines are ignoring all of it, because they can’t read it! Sometimes browsers will convert fonts that aren’t supported into readable fonts, but some programs just convert non-readable fonts into graphics. The program iweb, for example, gives us lots of great fonts to choose from. However, a lot of these fonts automatically get changed into unreadable graphics when the website is published.
To be safe, always stick with browser supported fonts, even though a lot of them look pretty unglamorous. I tend to stick with the basic ones, just to play it totally safe: Arial, Arial Black, Arial Narrow, Courier New, Georgia, Sans-serif, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS and Verdana. If the look of your site is totally dependent on a specific font, there are software fixes out there that will allow you to use other fonts and render them in a manner that allows them to be read by search engines.
Updating Your Website – Search engines put extra emphasis on newer text. In an ideal world, you are adding new and interesting content to your website all the time. That, frankly, is the biggest advantage of a WordPress site. It’s easy to add new text. However, if you simply cannot add a new page to your website every month or so, you should, at the very least, go to your website and change something. While this is not the same as adding whole new chunks of content, it’s better than leaving your website entirely static for years and years.
The other thing that you can do to automatically give search engines something new to look at is to add an RSS feed to your website. In short, an RSS feed is a constantly changing and updating list of topics and articles from other sources that you have chosen to subscribe to. The result of adding an RSS feed to your webpage is that you have constantly changing text on your website, that you don’t have to attend to or create. (You can also submit your website or blog to an RSS feed so the content of your site is fed to other places.) If you’d like to know more about adding an RSS feed to your website, or submitting your website or blog to an RSS feed, click here: (Article to be inserted soon!)
To review: Search engines are designed to deliver interesting, useful, informative text to users. Despite the many tricks and tactics suggested by many SEO companies and consultants, the best long-term strategy for getting your website ranked in search engines is to create and keep creating readable, original, informative text for your website. Use anchor text to target keywords, make sure that anchor text takes users to a page that has the proper meta tags and title, and that that page is full of keyword-rich text that has been based on thorough keyword research. Lastly, make sure that you use one of the common, browser supported fonts, so that search engines can read the text on your page.
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