A lot has changed in the last ten years in the field of search engine optimisation. Back in the early days, it was relatively easily to gain decent search engine rankings by adding a generous sprinkling of keywords to a website’s meta tags and then repeating those keywords somewhere on the page. Those were the good old days!
Of course, the above was open to manipulation and sites would try to rank in the top ten for keywords that weren’t directly related to what they were offering. For example, a holiday cottage website in France might also try to rank for ‘hotels in France’ and other related-but broad search terms. This attempt to get more traffic led to poor search engine results pages, which reduced the experience of the visitor.
To improve the relevancy of their index, search engines constantly update their ranking algorithms. Small changes happen regularly and much larger updates – such as Google’s ‘Caffeine’ update – happen every few years. Each time there is a big change to the way pages are ranked; SEO companies have to fine-tune their strategy to meet the new search engine requirements.
One major effort to improve results relevancy was the introduction of link popularity by Google. It is much harder to influence the content on another person’s website and so this became an important part of search engine optimisation – building up links from other high-quality websites that are of a relevant nature. This concept was introduced a few years ago but continues to be an important part of what the search engines measure when deciding where to rank sites.
Another key aspect of a search engine’s algorithm is the visible text on a website. As the search engines cannot read the content contained within images, words are what they primarily use to establish what a site is about. It is the text on your site, combined with the words used in the inbound link text that combine to tell the search engines what you should rank for.
Good-quality on-page content is also very hard to fake. Sites are either content rich – making them a useful resource for visitors and therefore deserving of a high search engine ranking – or they aren’t. It is because of this, that the visible text is one of the three main things that the search engines look at when deciding where to rank your site.
So what makes good content?
It should be useful to visitors
The art to successful search engine optimisation is to integrate keywords naturally into the site, in content that is useful to visitors. The web is a place to share information – and by providing a resource for visitors, you encourage them to come back. They may also recommend your site to friends or link to you – both helping to drive new visitors your way. Thinking of ways you can add value to your visitors by providing useful information will make your site successful in a number of different ways.
It must be unique
Good content that is going to help your search engine rankings must be unique. Whilst you are not technically penalised for publishing duplicate content on the web, Google will simply ignore your page if the content has already been published somewhere else.
This is illustrated with the following example: when any search is conducted on Google, there are millions of pages within its index that contain the target key phrase. For example, a search for ‘search engine optimisation’ currently brings up 6,330,000 pages.
However after browsing to results 891-898, Google displays the following message: “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 898 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”
The pages that have been omitted here are all considered duplicate content and are filtered out of the main search engine results.
It needs to contain your target keywords
A well-written piece of SEO copy is written with the target key phrase in mind. Whilst it shouldn’t be over-stuffed with repetitive keywords that don’t read well, it should be obvious what the target phrases are.
An SEO copywriter’s job is to integrate your target keywords in the correct balance to both read well to visitors and meet the current search engine’s requirements.
To conclude
A well-optimised site should provide good-quality, unique content for visitors that is based around the keywords you want to be found for. This helps the search engines correctly index your site – and holds visitors’ interest when they get there.
