Session 1: Content is King
We begin our SEO training sessions with a discussion of the importance of content on your site. Unique and relevant content is vital for your customers and the success of your site.
The single most important factor to ensure success on your website is unique content. Content must also be fresh and relevant for each category page. We cannot stress enough the importance for this type of content in order to garner search traffic. Nothing is more critical in achieving solid organic and paid traffic.
Your content, coupled with the keywords your customers are searching for on your product, should tell your customers what you want them to know about your product. You content should engage your readers!
Ideally, content for the main category should contain between 250 – 500 words. If it is more than that, take the opportunity to break the content out into a “next” page. Over 500 words on one page is a choking point for the spider. Creating additional pages is an additional opportunity for indexing and linking. One of ABOUT.com’s secrets to success was to provide the content into bite sized morsels and multiple pages then ID different target words for each of the pages and cross link them. The end result was more pages for the spider to crawl and more indexed words, which resulted in more traffic.
As inner pages under a given category are created, the word content does not need to be as extensive. Content could only be 50 – 100 words. However, the descriptions must be unique, relevant, and fresh.
The more unique, fresh, relevant content written on the page and via blogs, forums, fan clubs, social networks, and so forth about your site and the more deep links to it the more potential link power you have.
What Spiders Like!
When the spider hits a site and enters a page it’s like a blind person entering a room. You have to tell the spider what it “sees.” You must tell it this is a site about your product. The best way to do this is not only supply the spider with relevant and fresh content that employs keywords based on word research, but to place additional clues for the spider to discover. These additional clues are things like:
Page title
Meta description
Header tags
File names
Images named with relevant words and alt text tabs.
These, coupled with the most critical element, content on the topic, are a powerful combination.
Next Tuesday, in Session 2, we will talk about spiders and page scrapes.
Tags: SEO, spiders, unique content