Writing Search Engine Friendly Content

Faced with increased competition on a relatively level playing field, businesses need to capitalise on every opportunity to stand out. Taking Google as an example, being in the top 10 results can increase sales by 40% in the first month, and by a staggering 80% in the second month (New Scientist, 25 June 2005).

It's clearly important therefore that a business maximises its search position. The aim of this article is to explain how you can improve your site's search engine performance by adopting a long-term content strategy and writing content that the search engines will love.

How do search engines work?

Before deciding how best to achieve good results, we need to understand how the search engines work. How do they find your site, and how do they know that a particular page is more relevant than another?

Search engines find your site by using a crawler, a software application which follows hyperlinks. If a site links to yours, then eventually a search engine crawler will follow that link and arrive on your site.

Once the search engine is aware of your site, it will follow up the crawler with another piece of software designed to index your site i.e. to determine how important it is, and to determine which keywords your site is relevant for.

Once your site has been indexed, it will show up in the search results. To begin with, you will typically not be high ranked and will show up only for results that are highly specific to your site.

How are the results determined?

Search engines generate the results by looking at the most relevant page for the keyword. The process of determining relevance is each search engine's most valuable secret, but generally, the search term has to be contextually relevant in the page, and the pages must be important.

By contextually relevant and important, we mean that the keyword must be in the content, but crucially also it must be considered relevant by other websites. For example, a page with no incoming links is considered less important than a page linked from an important site.

As the search engines improve, they are becoming better at determining context, so simply having a high keyword density does not work - the quality of the content is a key factor.

What can I do to improve search engine performance?

To summarise, there are three factors which affect your site's performance: quality and relevance of content, importance, and the ability of the search engine to read your page. Improve these, and your results will improve.

Improve content quality and relevance

The better your content is, the more relevant it will be to searchers, and the more likely it is that other sites will link to it, thus increasing its importance.

Adopt a long-term content strategy. Work out what search terms you want to attract and then write good content about those search terms. For example, a site selling cat food could write a large amount of content about cats to try and attract cat owners.

Regularly review the search terms that lead to surfers clicking through to your site, and then write content to specifically attract those search terms.

Make sure your content is well written, and don't forget to check the spelling and grammar.

Improve importance

Improve your site's importance by getting other sites to link to you. Encourage them to use well formed link text. For example "Visit the best cat food site in the world" would help the search engine understand that your site is considered top dog when it comes to cat food.

Don't forget to link back! You'll help the other site increase its importance, which in turn will help you.

Make it easy for the search engine to understand

Taking cat food as an example, you'll more than likely have the words "Cat Food" as a heading on one of your pages. Make sure that you use appropriate HTML code to tell the search engine that it is a heading i.e. <H1>Cat Food</H1>. Many sites will just use the font tag to increase the size of the text, and the search engine thinks that it is only part of a paragraph, and isn't very important.

Pick sensible page names for your content. For example, this page is named "writing_search_engine_friendly_content" - this helps the search engine understand what the page is about. Similarly, make sure that the page title is well formed. This page has the title "Writing Search Engine Friendly Content" - again, this helps the search engine work out what the page is about.

Avoid using images or flash where you can use text. Search engines cannot read text within an image, so having a fancy graphic saying "Cat Food" at the top of your page is pointless. You can use CSS to make text look fancy, so you don't need to sacrifice too much style.

Make sure that all your link text is well formed, even if it links to a page within your own site. Do not use "Click here", use "Visit the cat food emporium" instead.

Need more help?

Switchplane provide a variety of search engine optimisation services, including writing effective content, site audits, and updating markup. Contact us now for more information.

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