Creating search engine friendly website content

Building a visually stunning website is not enough to ensure any success for your online presence. “Build it, and they will come” is not the way things work online.To reach your target market, you must make your site search engine-friendly. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of increasing visibility on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.

When you start to develop a page for your website consider the page's main focus and take a look at your list of keywords - what keyword(s) best describes what's on that page?

There are some areas of a web page that are important and will "call out" to the search engines what the main topic of the page is. A good plan when creating a page is to keep it topic focused by integrating your keywords into different places such as the:

• Page Title
• Description
• Keywords
• Headers
• Special formatting such as bolding or italicizing
• Throughout the written content
• In text links

Writing title, description and keywords tags

Each of these meta tags; title, description and keywords tags, can be added to your site by clicking on Page > Page Properties > Metadata.

• The area labeled Page Title is where you put your title tag. Your page title tag should include the main keyword or concept of your page, your business or website name and, if relevant, your location and should be under 70 characters long. Here's a basic example:

Fine Gold Jewelry | ABC Jewel Company | My Town, Texas
 

• The area labeled Description is where you put your description tag. Your description tag should include the main keywords for the page and the name of your company and, if relevant, the location. It should be under 200 characters long and should entice visitors to click through to your site. Here's a basic example:

ABC Jewel Company provides customers in and around My Town, Texas with the finest yellow and white gold jewelry imported directly from Italy. Stop in today!
 

• The area labeled Keywords is where you will put in the main keywords for the page. Don't stuff keywords, only list keywords that apply to the content of the page. Here is a basic example:

fine gold jewelry, gold jewelry, white gold jewelry, ABC Jewel Company, My Town Texas, TX
 

A URL needs to be meaningful to search engines. Search engines don’t generally use human beings to index websites – they use automated processes (known as spiders) to do so. It therefore helps to make sure your content makes sense to these spiders, starting with your URL structure.

Some people immediately disadvantage themselves on this score by using a Content Management System such as WordPress and leaving URL generation on the default settings.

Here’s an example:

By default, WordPress will generate URLs like this:

www.example.com/?p=2588176

As you can see, this makes little sense, and tells neither humans nor Web search spiders what the content is about. This is a better URL:

www.example.com/an-article-about-websites

The first link is a dynamic URL; not only is it unfriendly to search engines but to users as well. The second link is static and more user-friendly since we can easily figure out what the page is about – and so will Google.

It’s actually really easy to make WordPress generate friendly URLs instead of dynamic ones. You will find the settings in WordPress under “Settings” then “Permalinks.”

2. Think about your keywords 

Keywords are an integral part of any SEO campaign. If you fail to include relevant keywords in your content, Google may never find it – however good it is.

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a good place to start when researching keywords. You can use it to get an idea of how many people search for different phrases, and how hot the competition is to get ranked for them.

Once you have ascertained the keywords you wish to target, conventional wisdom is to include them in your posts and pages in the following areas:

• Page titles
• Sub headings
• The main body of your copy
• Your URLs
• Image filenames and “ALT” text

Obviously Google (and the other search engines) don’t ever reveal how their algorithms work. If they did, it would be too easy for people to unfairly manipulate them.

The current school of thought is that Google’s algorithm is sufficiently sophisticated to distinguish between genuine, quality copy, and keyword-stuffed bulk content. So don’t go crazy with including keywords – try instead to write unique, high quality copy, with keywords incorporated naturally but not excessively.

3. Optimise images

People often concentrate too much on text content when working on SEO, but forget about their images. However, it seems that the likes of Google do pay considerable attention to images when determining search engine positions.

Here are a few tips:

• Keep your file sizes small – you can use an image editor like Photoshop to reduce the size of your images (usually by reducing the quality or dimensions). This will reduce your site loading times and make your website experience more optimal for readers. As we said above, details of search engine algorithms are not made public, but the fact that Google mention “site health” on their AdSense dashboard certainly seems to indicate that site performance plays a part.
• Remember the importance of alternative (alt) text, which allows you to include a keyword in the description of the image. This helps search engine spiders determine the content of images. Alt text is also vital for the visually impaired, as screen reading software will read the alt text to help them understand the page content.
• Make sure your images  are relevant to the surrounding text content.

4. Create an XML sitemap

An XML sitemap isn’t the same as the HTML sitemap we see on some sites that can help readers with navigation.

An XML sitemap is a structured list of URLs intended for search engines, to help them find all your posts and pages and index them more easily.

If you are using WordPress, you can easily add an XML site map with one of these two popular plugins: