SEO King: Content

Everyone in the SEO & search engine marketing industry knows the phrase “content is king,” because content IS king. What will flag the search engine bots more than anything else is bad content, too many links, dead links, obvious keyword placements, black hat SEO tactics, and other content-related faux pas. Content, you hopefully know, is the substance and life of your page, the information, paragraphs, descriptions, and links. Search engine bots, especially Google’s, prefer pages that are heavy in text, because it makes them easier to categorize and rank.

That’s not the only factor in content’s majesty. If you want your page to be useful to the world, then you need to say something: something unique or useful, funny or clever, or anything that is educational will do. Inbound links from other similar sites will lead users to your content if it is good and useful. People enjoy sharing traffic with quality writers and thinkers. Demystifying articles, ones that really shock people with revelations, have a good chance of hitting the front pages of sites like Digg.com and Reddit.com, too. Those two sites can potentially produce more than 70,000 links to your site in a day!

If you’re trying to move products, not to create heart warming content, then there are things you can do. First of all, add useful and informational descriptions about each of your products, rather than just posting photos. Create a question and answer forum for users, which will give you the opportunity to become well known as an industry authority. People will link to your advice, which will result in sales. Also, you could create a blog with interesting semi-relevant articles, like Top 10 lists and informational guides. Create a page of relevant links that your users will like, and gain ranking from search engine bots by typing out long descriptions of each.

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Search Engine Submissions & Spider-Bots

When you feel that your site is ready to go, and optimized with right, not-too-competitive keywords, then it’s time to submit your site to search engines. This means, that in effect, you are inviting search engine bots to visit your site, and to add it to their index of web sites. Actually, what most people don’t know, is that this is entirely unnecessary. Engines, intuitive and ingenious bots that they are, find sites like yours by linking through other portals. So, even if your site only has one inbound link, chances are that a spider-bot has already perused your stuff, indexed you appropriately, and given you an initial rating. Without inbound links, your site would not rank well, anyway, so you needn’t worry about manually entering you site for submission, unless you’ve recently overhauled it, and would like to be judged, anew.

A spider-bot, or Googlebot, goes crawling all over the information highway, linking information and evaluating its content. Before a site begins performing well and ranking highly, it is referred to as being in the “sandbox.” This is a place like limbo, that’s neither negative or positive, that’s meant for reform and learning. Because new sites are most often less valuable than established, proven favorites, Google and other popular search engines will leave it in the sandbox for many months, until it proves itself as an industry expert. SEO & search engine marketing really can’t come into play when a site is that new, but after the initial six months, a site can “front page” on even Google.

Make sure your links are created using Java script, or Flash, if you want search engines to find them. If you have pages that aren’t well linked, they will be orphaned, or discounted, from your ranking. Dynamic URLs are commonly believed to rank worse than static ones, so most web masters and pros choose to follow SEO & search engine marketing maneuvers by using Mod Rewrite to change them.

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Competition and Working with It

Special search page on the Wikimedia Commons. ...
Image via Wikipedia

You know how you want your site to have millions and millions of hits every single day? Guess what – everybody else wants the exact same thing for their own sites. So needless to say, there is going to naturally be a lot of competition for those precious page views – and more importantly, for the opt ins that will make you sales and get you life long clients. After all, a life long client is like a giant gold statue on your door step, isn’t it? Getting these clients to appear in your web site is obviously a matter of having great content and solid SEO, so that the search engines will know what you’re all about. Once they know that, they’re just bound to send you plenty of people who (hopefully) want what you’re selling.

However, there is a factor that a lot of people don’t think too much about, when they’re doing their research. It concerns more than just how many searches are being done on a particular word of phrase during a particular time frame – but how many people or companies are working on optimizing for a particular key word or phrase. The amount of competition you are facing can be a very significant factor in whether or not you can get top billing on a particular search. Google can be very fickle, after all – especially since they changed their code to take in the index of similar, related keywords when it comes to placing a given site.

If you’ve never heard of LSI, it concerns how similar keywords can be related to a unifying topic. For instance, “apartment” would also likely have “town home,” “zero maintenance,” “condo,” and “free rent” in its LSI stable. When you think about it, this is really nothing more than just common sense. One of the best things about LSI is that it can be the little extra edge that can carry you over your competitors, and right into the winner’s circle (or the first page, whichever comes first). So hammer the topic, not just the key words.

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What Exactly is LSI?

Google "one click search"
Image by Piutus via Flickr

Not enough pixels have been turned over in the effort to identify and work with the Latent Semantic Index (or LSI, for short). But its role in the nature of Google and other search engines is as pervasive as it is undeniable. LSI is probably going to be here to stay, because it just makes sense to keep (and expand on) it. A lot of web site owners who are normally on the ball when it comes to new search trends haven’t really heard much about LSI – it isn’t very sexy, after all. But its role is far too important to be ignored. So let’s get down to explaining just what LSI is, and touch on how much it can help your web site.

All web sites that have any kind of wording on them have the potential to get listed for a particular key word or phrase. And in most cases, they have the potential to get listed for several of them. But while it is obviously important to feature the key word or phrase that you intend to optimize your site for, it is also important to keep the whole thing moving along in context. If not for context, we would have ridiculous, gibberish sites like we had back in the 90s – when all you have to do is put in a key word the most times to get the search engines to notice, you would be amazed at how many instances of a given word could be shoe horned into a relatively small space.

But without a touch of reason, the whole process just gets ridiculous. Putting in a word over and over again sounds like how a crazy person would search. Since most of the people online are clinically sane, you need to keep the words around your targeted words and phrases congruent. For instance, searching for a hotel might also involve the city you’re looking at, a star rating, a price range, and info about a view. Under the pre LSI system, these would have been ignored, which just doesn’t make sense.

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