Content and SEO

A lot of questions have risen up when it comes to SEO & Content. What type of content is best seen? What are Search Engines looking for exactly?

I’ll try to briefly explain below the most met situations.

I want my website popular!

No matter what or where, competition takes place. It is why the web world resemblances with the real world.

A lot of Web Designers reached up fearing the web competition due to its natural growth, ending up focusing on popularity and less on content quality. Focus too much on popularity and the obsession will only hit you back.

So what is the right way?

There isn’t one single right way, but I do know one that always had success and always will. Quality, quality and quality and I can’t stress you enough with it.

Most Webmasters ended up believing they need a lot of content to get more and more hits through the search engines, well, that is in a somewhat manner true, but inconclusive and non-professional.

If you are opening up a blog, don’t go posting 1000km long posts, go for the quality. By that I mean, if your post was written in 1000 lines, though it can be done in 500, go with 500. The search engines love, no… they adore quality content!

Search Engine Indexing

When the search engines index your pages, they automatically find and use some keywords from the content which they believe is more relevant and have priority. And here is the trick, they do not like adding tons of keywords from a very long article, they sum up the number to a reasonable amount of keywords which may include the less important parts. So I’m obviously going for the well known saying “The bigger doesn’t always win”, especially when it comes to SEO.

Does typography matter?

SEO-relevant? Absolutely not, that is just the visual part (front-end) which you get the visitors to feel comfortable with, while browsing and reading through your site.

What type of content is best seen?

There is no such thing, as long as it’s legal, search engines love any type of content, however, there is another way you could view this one. There is one specific search engine which hunts good related content and if you haven’t yet guessed it, I’ll tell you, it’s Google!

Google will favor your site better among others if:

The content is similar on more pages from your site, thus, resulting your site seen as a better promising resource.

You do not build your pages from too many HTML frames

You do not have fishy redirections to other pages

You have a clean code

So is it all about content?

Simple answer? No.

Content is one of the most important keys to SEO, but it is not all up to that. Another valuable key one should never miss, is the semantic code. Structuring an HTML page properly using the right tags for the right content, automatically makes your page more SEO-Friendly.

Bad PHP generated URLs vs SEO-Friendly URLs

A very common mistake in blogs, communities and other social-networking websites, is how the URLs are being generated. Fortunately, most of the CMS’ and web scripts out there offer great support for friendly URLs nowadays. They usually let you tweak such a setting in their own settings panel, so go ahead and turn SEO-Friendly URLs ON if you have it. If not, I’d suggest you go look for support on how to get it done.

Non-friendly generated URL: www.domain.com/articles.php?page=article& _id=123

SEO-Friendly URL: www.domain.com/article/news

The way to every website’s page is via web addresses (URLs) and search engines enjoy clean URLs where they’ll easily index from a page to another. But they meet some difficulties with bad generated URLs and here are some reasons why:

they usually stumble upon inexistent pages

some generated pages require certain data which for search engines will display errors or it won’t display at all.

sometimes the PHP generated URLs change when certain modifications are done on the websites, thus, leading to inexistent indexed pages in the search engines.

Backlinks

One of the big battles over the internet when it comes to SEO, is the backlinks battle.

A backlink is an HTML link on a web page linking to another. It is how search engines recognize what web pages are recommended and more important.

When you consider getting backlinks for your web pages specifically to get more recognition from the search engines, do consider the followings:

Your link on another page will not contain the ‘nofollow’ (i.e. <a href=”www.domain.com rel=”nofollow”>Go here</a>)

It contains a title tag (i.e. <a href=”www.domain.com” title=”Learn more about the web”>More about the web</a>. Of course, it comes natural that the title information should be relevant to your page’s content.

The page which links to you has been already indexed by the search engines, and you can check by searching in a popular search engine, the exact URL. If it displays, it means it’s indexed, and vice-versa. It’s important to have backlinks from indexed pages, otherwise your pages will get no relevancy from those links.

Pagerank

People still value pages by their pagerank and I’m still wondering why. Since Google’s pagerank is the most popular among all, people tend to value pages by it. But know that Google refreshes the pagerank periodically each 2-4 months. So when you look at the pagerank of a page, you may just be watching a 2-3 months pagerank, the current one may either be lower or higher.

When you compare your website with others, don’t do it by pagerank, do it by search results.

Search results are updated almost live, so when you get more relevancy for your web pages from backlinks, you won’t see changes in your pagerank, but on search results and you’ll most likely get more on top of the other results.

I hope this article has been helpful for you. Good luck!

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