Content is King

Currently the majority of sites on the Internet do not pay much, if any, attention to SEO. For example, you would be very hard pushed to explain rocket science to someone in one paragraph of text, yet so many sites have only very short descriptions of what they are about. These are usually sites aimed at selling a product, which is very silly, as someone looking for a particular product obviously wants to find out more about it. If you have not done a good enough job of convincing someone about a certain product then you loose that person as a visitor and as a sale.

Another problem, even with good quality content, is that if it is written by a professional writer rather than a SEO, your rankings could be hurt. This is a subject of great debate: do you ruin the flow of the page to get good search engine results or do you sacrifice high search engine rankings so the page reads well? The answer is you do neither you find a good compromise, which takes care and experience.

What Can We Do About It?

Search engine spiders are really just basic old age web browsers, such is IE2 or netscape2. They are text only browsers and read the HTML code from top to bottom just as you or I read a page. One good way to get an idea of what the search engines will be seeing is to view your site in a non-graphical browser, such as Lynx (a.k.a. Links). Don't be too alarmed at the results when you see all your hard design work pulled to pieces. This is what search engines will see. Remember they don't care too much about how it looks, only how it reads. Viewing a page in a non-graphical browser highlights the importance of having things like image ALT tags and Title tags for links etc.

The placement of the content within the code is also very important as search engines consider text nearer the top of the page to be more relevant and hence give it a higher ranking. This is not always easy to do if like many sites, you use HTML tables to control the layout. "But I can't get the look I want without tables," you say? Then here's a solution: by using CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets Specification 2.0), you have many benefits on top of creating clean search engine friendly code. The great benefit of CSS2 for SEO is that you can place your important content anywhere in the code and can control its position, layout and formatting by the external style sheet. What I do with sites using CSS2 is place the content at the very top of the code, then the navigation links, menus, etc., and then items as you would wish them to be displayed on the page. Because of this it is perhaps worth having a serious think about re-coding your site to use CSS2.