Content is King

What is the one thing that search engine users and spiders are looking for? CONTENT! Content is what people want to see, so why do people fill their sites with pointless bandwidth-intensive graphics? People search the web to find information, which is normally in textual form. Providing good quality, relevant content should be the number one SEO technique as it has a huge effect on search engine rankings, yet it is often overlooked!

So What's It All About?

The web is a great free resource for information. The reason for this is that there is a wealth of good quality documents containing - you've guessed it! - good quality content. Search engines help people to find all this great content by sending out "spiders" to view sites and rank them depending on how relevant the CONTENT is to the keyword or phrase that the user typed in. The more relevant content and hence useful information a site has to offer the higher it will rank in search engines. SIMPLE! Sure, there are loads of other SEO techniques that are used to boost rankings, and are very important, but to a lesser extent (except perhaps the title tag). You could have the most optimised site on the web but if it had no content to it would not be relevant to anyone - so would not be ranked very highly.

As unscrupulous SEOs take advantage of search engines ranking algorithms to artificially boost a site's ranking, certain techniques come and go. The only way to do it properly and to the letter of the law is to do it honestly, ethically and provide good content. For example, in 2001, anyone involved in SEO would have told you that you MUST use meta tags for keywords and descriptions, which was certainly true at the time. Now, however meta tags make virtually no difference to your ranking. This is not to say that you shouldn't use them as some smaller search engines still make use of meta tags. This highlights the fact that the Search Engine Optimization industry is constantly changing and you need to keep up with the latest news to stay on top, this is perhaps the most important SEO lesson of all.