With Search Engine Optimisation, Content is King

With Search Engine Optimisation, Content is King

When it comes to online marketing of any description, the clear goal behind the marketing is to reach out to an audience. If no one is accessing your content, then its existence is fairly pointless.

In order to maximise your web presence, there has been a growing trend towards ensuring that online content is optimised for search engines. Content can be optimised for search engines in a number of ways: targeting particular keywords and obtaining links from other websites being two very popular ways to make your website appear more attractive to a search engine.

However, whilst the technical side of search engine optimisation is important, it is not the be-all and end-all; and well-written and relevant content is often crucial to the success of any optimised website. With search engine optimisation, content is king!

Writing for a human, not a machine

The temptation when writing content for a website is to go through a keyword list and just pepper the text with a huge percentage of agreed keywords relating to the website. Whilst a keyword focus should certainly be maintained throughout, the copy has to read well.

Remember, you’re not writing for a computer that just sees multiple uses of a word, you’re writing for a human being; and if they’re quickly turned off by a stilted and keyword saturated text then your bounce rate is going to be sky high and subsequently you may well be ranked as less important by the search engines.

Website content should be meaningful

With keywords being regarded as so important, it’s no wonder that lots of websites are merely pages of keywords strung together into loosely fitting sentences. One of the keys with website traffic is ensuring that a visitor turns into a repeat visitor, and the only way to do that is to supply them with interesting and meaningful content. Meaningful content will also increase your likelihood of obtaining links, which will again help with your search engine rank.

Stale content ensures stagnation

One of the important things to ensure when writing content for the web is that it is frequently updated. If your website is constantly generating new content then that tells the search engines that your site is interesting, relevant and important and this will certainly help when it comes to the search engine results pages.

Content should be original

Search engines are cleverer than most of us give them credit for, and consequently you need to be very careful about the content that you produce. A big no-no in terms of search engine optimisation is the tendency to copy text from other websites. This may well make the search engines think that your website is not unique and this will reflect negatively in terms of your search engine ranking.