Content
Good content is what makes a Web site attractive to a visitor and what search engines evaluate to rank your Web site. Creating well-written, unique content is absolutely critical for your search engine optimization success. Content written for the purpose of SEO is designed to achieve organic rankings by appealing to the reader and to the search engine. Whether your Web site ends up on the first page or the hundredth search results page of Google depends on the quality and relevance of your content.
The key to building long-tern ranking on search engines is to write content with SEO principles in mind but for people, not for search engines. Web sites that simply stuff keywords into poorly written content have no chance to improve their rankings. The algorithms nowadays are intelligent enough to determine whether a page is acceptable for human visitor. How to write good web content is discussed in the Content and Readability.
Although you must write content for people and not search engines, you should use proper keyword density throughout each page of your Web site. First, you need to optimize each page of your site for no more than one or two keywords and minimize non-target words throughout your content, so that Google can see that your Web site is relevant to search queries that you want to rank for. Then by using available tools, you can incorporate target keywords without spoiling the natural flow of the writing.
When you write content, you should avoid duplicate content. Duplicate content occurs when your site contains content identical or similar to that already exists on the Web. Writing unique content is the most obvious way to avoid duplicate content.
It is vitally important to your Web site’s success to update content on a regular basis. Search engines consider fresh content to be of greater value than outdated content. Keeping content current is essential for maintaining search engine rankings.
When creating your content apply powerful principle called latent semantic content, which means using keywords similar to the theme and relevance of your page. You can use latent semantic content to create relevancy while preserving the organic flow of the content.
As today it is acceptable to include non-HTML documents to your Web site these files must be optimized to be properly indexed by search engines and shown in result pages.
Unique Content
Write a unique content which is good for SE, for links, for visitors. Search engines value new information that has not been published before. A site based on materials taken from other sites is much less likely to get to the top in search engines. As a rule, original source material is always higher in search results.
While creating a site, remember that it is primarily created for human visitors, not search engines. Getting visitors to your site is only the first step and it is the easiest one. The truly difficult task is to make them stay on the site and convert them into purchasers. You can only do this by using good content that is interesting to real people.
Fresh Content
An interesting site on a particular topic has much better chances to get links, comments, reviews, etc. from other sites on this topic. Such reviews can give you a good flow of visitors while inbound links from such resources will be highly valued by search engines.
Try to update information on the site and add new pages on a regular basis. Search engines value sites that are constantly developing. Also, the more useful text your site contains, the more visitors it attracts. Write articles on the topic of your site, publish visitors’ opinions, create a forum for discussing your project. Interesting and attractive content guarantees that the site will attract interested visitors.
Duplicate Content
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content issues occur when multiple Web sites contain identical or similar content. Search engines have implemented new filters specifically to monitor duplicate content. There is a certain amount of flexibility with the percentage of similarity on a page, but t this is open to debate as to what percentage would constitute duplicate content. If you are sure that you have not copied anyone else’s content, you still must be aware of the issue because someone might attempt to steal your content.
What constitutes duplicate content?
Instances of duplicate content arise in two primary ways: you copy someone else’s content for use on your page, or someone else copies your content fore use on their page. Another common occurrence of duplicate content:
• pages used purely for print formatting
• pages with parameters for style, formatting etc.
• pages with similar content, i.e. different URL’s but the same text on those pages
• pages with different URL’s but all being redirected to the same page
• be wary of Content Management Systems (CMS) which often lead to an incredible amount of duplicate content if not used correctly
Duplicate content issues:
• the following URLs are different but show the same content: example.com/, example.com/?, example.com/index.html, example.com/Home.aspx, www.example.com/, www.example.com/?, www.example.com/index.html, www.example.com/Home.aspx. Google will recognize that they’re the same, and will try to pick the right one, (although sometimes they pick the wrong one).
• with multiple versions of the same thing, Google will spend more time crawling the same content, meaning it will have less time to go deeper into your site, and you run the risk of having content not get indexed.
• your link popularity will be diluted. Backlinks pointing to several different URL versions of the same content, will make it harder to accumulate link juice for one URL.
• having a spider indexing duplicate content on your Web site causes your server resources (i.e. processing power) are unnecessarily depleted, potentially leading to a poorer speed of website traversal.
How to Avoid Duplicate Content:
Avoiding duplicate content will allow you to eliminate penalties that are applied by search engines when duplicate content issues are discovered.
• use a tool located at www.copyscape.com which allows you to search for instances of duplicate content
• use different content, i.e. modify the content to be noticeably different from the copies
• use robots.txt file or robots meta tag
• use a “canonical” version of the URL, meaning the simplest, most significant form. Pick one for each page and link consistently within your site. You can also use the rel=”canonical” link element.
Keyword Density
Using proper keyword density is a process that includes the strategic repetition of select, target keywords and minimization of nontarget keywords throughout your content. In this way you tell search engines that your Web site is relevant to search queries that you want to rank for. For example, if a specific word is used 5 times on a page containing 100 words, the keyword density is 5%.
The optimum value for keyword density is 3-5%. In the case of keyword phrases, you should calculate the total density of each of the individual keywords comprising the phrases to make sure it is within the specified limits.There are powerful keyword density tools like one located at the www.Webuildpages.com that helps you conduct keyword density analysis of your Web site. Ideally, you should optimize your Web site for at least 20-30 keywords. Each specific page in the Web site should be individually optimized for 1-2 keywords. The number of keywords varies with the type of Web site and the number of pages on the site.
In the past, keyword density was much more important aspect of the SEO process that it is today. The idea of using latent semantic content is replacing the idea of applying basic keyword density principles. Search engines rank Web sites not on the density of its target words but on topical relevance of semantically linked words. Covering as many semantically linked terms as possible within your content helps to get high relevancy of your Web site. Google Keyword suggestion tool as well as many other keyword research tools gives you an idea of what the search engine consider being semantically relevant words.