Why Content is King for SEO?

There has never been such a tough war among the websites for SEO. With thousands of websites being launched on a day-to-day basis, how will the search engines sort the websites based on the search queries?

The answer lies in the quality of the content. For the search engines, content is the most important factor that decides the quality of the website. The website which caters a particular service can only be identified by the contents in it. Earlier, when there were very few websites that catered a particular service, identifying them with the Meta tags or title tags was quite easy. As competition increased in this new era of online communication, where thousands of websites are identified for a particular service or product, the process of identifying the right one as per the search request has become a tough task for the search engine crawlers. Thus, the new search engine strategies consider contents as the most important of all, demanding serious attention from the webmasters for preparing effective contents for their websites.

The following concerns have to be addressed appropriately while creating the contents of a website.

* Relevance
* Duplication
* Keyword density
* Freshness

Relevant content

How do you differentiate a banking website from a real estate one? Of course; by its contents. The thumb rule is that your website should contain the most appropriate content that describes your products or services. The quality content will enhance the visibility of your website and at the same time improve the standard of your website. Ultimately, user interaction is the purpose of all SEO processes. A website that contains the sufficient information for a user is always rated as the best. All the more, the right content will attract more inbound links to the website. The traffic of the inbound links is decided primarily by the relevance of the contents. A poorly managed content in your website, on the other hand, will invite penalty from the search engines for promoting spam links. Thus relevant content serves three fruitful purposes for the effective functioning of a website.

Duplication

There are two ways of duplicating your contents- internal and external. Internal duplication is caused when the content of one page is repeated in parts or full in some other pages, whereas external duplication is caused when someone else copies your content and publish in their websites. Internal duplication can be avoided easily as you have the total control over it.

Preventing external duplication is not very easy. The only method you can adopt is to check the duplication by using software such as ‘Copyscape’ on a regular basis and make the changes accordingly.

Search engines will penalize the website for duplication. Therefore, it is very important that you take precautionary measures to avoid any type of duplication.

Keywords

While preparing the content, care has to be taken for filling the content with appropriate number of keywords. As a thumb rule, the keyword density should be around 20% of the website. Avoid lengthy pages, but do not restrict them to less than 250 words.

Freshness

Search engine algorithm check the websites for updates. If a website is found without any updates for a long time, it could be ignored by the search engines, provided it found other similar websites with fresh contents. Don’t ignore the fact that the user who gets trapped into your website would wish for the most recent information.

Content of the website, thus, serves the most important functions of SEO.

Tips to improve Google PageRank

‘Content is King’ is the mantra for improving the Google PageRank. Ultimately it is the content that matters most for the Google crawlers. The text, the appropriate keywords, inbound and outbound links- all play an important role in deciding the page rank of a website.

Here are a few tips to improve the Google Page Ranking

§ Website Index : Check whether your website is indexed or not. On the Google Tool Bar, click ‘Options’ and find the ‘Page info menu’ under the tab ‘More’. This will give an idea whether Google has already indexed your page. To check which all pages in your site is not indexed by the Google test them with the link SSW Link Auditor Googe RageRank Report

§ Title tag: Title tag must contain the website name and the primary keyword. The size of the title tag should be approximately 10-20 words. The title tag should be descriptive, and at the same time concise.

§ Sitemap : A sitemap is an essential element required for larger websites or those with a large number of folders and subfolders. This will enable the search engines to locate each link easily.

§ Content: The website should have relevant content. Make sure that the content is unique; in other words, not a duplicate.

§ Keyword density : The quality of the content is decided by the keyword density. The keyword density (number of keywords per total word count of the text) should be between 5 and 20%. A content with keyword density less than 5% will not be identified by the website; on the other hand, a content with keyword density more than 20% will be ignored by the search engines for keyword redundancy.

§ Inbound links : Inbound links have to be used very carefully. They can be both advantageous and disadvantageous. Make sure that the website that you are linked to has the contents relevant to the page in your website. Inbound links from popular websites bring better results than from the unpopular ones. However, you should pay attention to the fact that if the website that gives a link to your website owns multiple outbound links and thus functions as a link farm, both of you will be penalized for that.

§ Blogs: Inbound links from blogs can be a good method to improve the page ranking. Blogs usually contain a part of the text from your website and so the links from such blogs will improve the traffic to your website.

§ Site link to Google : Google accepts the links of the websites through ‘Add a Site’ link. This will enable the Google crawlers to include your link to their search engine database.

§ Frames : Avoid frames in your website if possible. If the frames are very much essential for your website, use the ‘no frames’ tag in your codes.

§ Size : Do not exceed the content of the website above 101k. As a general rule, the search engines will give more page ranking to more number of smaller pages than fewer number of larger pages.

Also, you need to test the traffic to your website regularly. There are different ways to do that. Find out the details from the Internet.