Five Content Changes for Better SEO

Search engines love content. Follow these five simple guidelines in changing your content and you’ll see an improvement in how well your site is found.

Change bulleted lists to narrative paragraphs

A common technique people use to make sure they have everything they do listed on a page is to simply use a bulleted list of services, products, or equipment. It would seem like a good idea because it make sure that you have the keywords you need on the page, but it can backfire. A technique that has been labeled “keyword stuffing” was created to try to increase relevancy of pages so they would appear higher in search engines. It worked for awhile, but the smart people at companies like Google saw how it was being abused and figured out how to offset that trick in their algorithms. At its worst, it can get a site dropped from the index altogether, effectively make a whole site invisible from a search perspective.

A better choice is to take the time to turn the bulleted list into narrative paragraphs. Describe in friendlier and more conversational terms the services you provide. For example, “Our recent addition of a Cosmotron 2000 has allowed us to perform stamping and cutting of eight times as many hojarines an hour, often allowing us to turn around an order in a single day instead of a week.”

When describing equipment or products, link the names of the equipment to the manufacturer’s site’s pages, as this, too, will increase the calculated relevancy of your page in a natural way.

Repeat your keywords in your content

The best thing you can do to help your site get found online is to repeat your keywords in your actual content. If you want your site to be found when you’re talking about fundraising campaigns, you should make sure you use words like “fundraising,” “fundraiser,” and “raising money” in your content. Each keyword should be in the content three to five times. When those keywords are used as links to other relevant pages, that helps, too.

Try typing in a keyword you care about and visiting the first couple of sites that come up in your favorite search engine. Then look at how many times that keyword shows up on the page and where. It’s probably shown even more often than you’d guess.

Include at least 200 words of relevant content on the page

Part of search engine indexing is context. It’s not enough to have your keywords on the page, floating in some box or on a bulleted list. The context of the words in relation to each other matters. That means that search engines need more than just a couple of lines of text to figure out what you’re really saying. It seems that pages with at least two hundred words get better results when indexed. You’ll need that much just to make sure you repeat your keywords a few times anyway.

Articles should be 500-800 words long

Articles relevant to your audience and including your keywords will drive up your ranks in the search engines. It also provides material of interest to people, which is, after all, the primary reason to have a website: to get people learning more about your business and remaining engaged.

The length of your articles is important. Too short and it’s not enough to engage the visitor – he might read it, but it isn’t enough to become memorable. Too long, and he won’t finish. Reading online is done in fairly short bursts. Keep your articles between 500 and 800 words in length to balance engagement and attention.

Flash usually doesn’t work well with search

Flash-based content usually doesn’t get indexed. The text in a Flash movie isn’t visible to a search engine, so the site developed in Flash has to have additional work done to get the text to be repeated in a manner search engines will actually pick up. Few Flash-based sites do this well, or even at all.

A great way to see if your Flash-based site is likely to get indexed is to visit seo-browser.com and type in the URL for your site. That will let you see exactly what your site looks like to a search engine. More often than not, a Flash-based site looks like a nearly blank page.

Conclusion

Try these five techniques and your site should be well on its way to a better search engine presence.