

	SEO is Search Engine Optimization

Good Content: The Key To Search Engine Ranking

Good Content: The Key To Search Engine Ranking

What drives visitors to your website and keeps them there? Good content.

Content is Key

Good content is key to website promotion success. All the bells and whistles in the world will not hold an audience like compelling information. Ask yourself: Why would a visitor stay at my website? What are they looking for? What do I have that they need? What holds them there once I've got them visiting? You have to tell your story in a way that will keep your visitors interested and coming back for more.

Get Those Visitors

The first part of the process is getting visitors to your site through search engine promotion and other traditional marketing methods. As you increase your visibility, more visitors will come to see what the commotion is all about.

Keep Those Visitors

The second part of the process is keeping them there. If you provide quality information that is easy to access, you are giving the visitor what they are looking for. Don't give your visitors a reason to click away. Quality content means happy visitors, and with enough happy visitors, you become an "authority" on your topic. Having a site recognized as an authority means good ranking in the search engines.

Know Your Audience

So how do you get your visitors to stay on your site, and to return to it? First, you need to understand your audience. Who are you trying to reach? Create your pages with them in mind. Do you want to reach a narrow audience, or will you try to reach all levels of readers? Buzz words may make sense to you in your business, but will they reach your target audience? If you are a high-powered underwater basketweaving consultant, focused only on serious underwater basketweavers, you can keep the discussion on your site fairly technical. If, however, you really want to spread the joy of underwater basketweaving to a wider audience, you may want to keep the tone more general, giving newcomers to underwater basketweaving the information they need to become as enthralled by basketweaving as you are.

Get Your Visitors Involved

So what kind of content do you need to provide for your visitors? If you have a site selling gardening books, you will have lists of the titles you have for sale, an order form, and contact information. Everybody else selling gardening books will have these pages too. How do you rise above the crowd? How do you stand out as the definitive gardening book website?

Write Articles

One technique that you can use to good effect is that of writing articles pertaining to your site's topic. After all, who knows more about gardening and gardening books than you? Not only does this give your visitors yet another reason to keep coming back to your site, but it also allows you to reach out beyond your site. There are many other websites out there looking for authoritative information on your topic. Find those sites and submit your articles to them. This creates a "win-win" situation: the other web site gains the benefit of your knowledge, while you are further recognized as an authority in the field. Getting a link from that site back to yours brings more visitors to your site, and increases your site's link popularity.

Keeping an archive of articles on your website builds your knowledge base. You can refer visitors to your articles when answering their questions. People searching for information on the topics you have written about will find your articles listed in their search results. Once they arrive at your site, maybe they will buy something from you: if you know so much about planting bulbs, maybe your site is the place I should buy my bulb-planting books.

Other Offerings

What else can you add to this mix? Think about adding professional gardening book reviews, a gardening book club, FAQ's about gardening, gardening articles, a rating system for books, audience book reviews, and other gardening-related topics. Adding this type of information gives your visitors more reasons to keep coming back to your site. Offer free tools, create a forum. Set up a newsletter for your audience with your topic, adding in a discount for your product for newsletter readers. Give your audience a reason to come back to your website.

What Results Can I Expect: Google PageRank

A primary example of how this works is Google's PageRank. One of the most important aspects of ranking for Google and other search engines is good content. Google wants their search engine users to find what they are looking for, a successful search experience for their users. The keywords included in your site are important; after all, those are the terms your potential visitors are searching for. Now not only do you have your catalog pages and ordering information, but you also have a more in-depth treatment of the topics you have addressed in your articles, book reviews, and other materials. More keywords in more places means you have a better chance of matching a potential visitor's search.

So how can you "rise above" the other online gardening bookstores out there in the search engine listings? Link popularity can be the next important piece that allows you to differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack. All other things being equal, search engines that pay attention to link popularity will list your site higher in their results if you have more links coming back from other sites which have a focus related to yours. In other words, if your gardening bookstore has a number of backlinks pointing to it from the websites of gardening clubs, nurseries, and so forth, your site will be seen as more authoritative. The more authoritative a website looks to Google through link popularity, the higher that site will rank. After all, if all these other gardening-related sites point to your site, they are demonstrating that you have something important to say. That is another reason why it is important to have your material published on other websites.

Conclusion

Maintaining good content is a stepping-stone for your visitors to delve in deeper to your website. Taking the time to build your content and provide for your audience will pay off in good search engine ranking and returning visitors.

Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Marketing company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O'Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company.

Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without modification, including the bio information. Please include a hyperlink to http://www.searchinnovation.com when using this article in newsletters or online.

RELATED ARTICLES

Google Gunning For Directories?
Why is it that webmasters are so quick to blame Google if their website falls down the search rankings, or out of the rankings altogether? Can it never be their own fault?I read an amusing forum post headed "What's up with Google?". The writer had a website just 2 months old, which had only had 2 visits from Googlebot, a Google robot.

Forget SEO - It's All About Conversion!
Which SEO hat do you wear? Is it white or black? Or perhaps it's a subtle shade of gray. Well, wherever you are on this spectrum, if you are like 99% of the SEO-fixated webmasters out there, you are doing all you can to get visitors to your site.

Maximising Google's PageRank of Your Website to Maximise Traffic
Google uses PageRank to rank your pages. To maximize your rank, you must understand how to work with it.

PageRank for Websites: Is There More to the Web?
Google's PageRank has been around for years, and in the opinions of a lot of e-business owners, it can make or break a site. Lately, with Google's fingers in every pie, it seems important to remind everyone that there is more to a website than just PageRank.

Optimize your Search Engine Placement Five Easy Ways
If you are like me, you created web site metatags with the help of your Web master. Maybe like me, you didn't spend time or money submitting to search engines because you weren't techie enough.

Search Engine Optimization - Enhancing Web Site Visibility
I've had several prospects and clients say to me "I want my web site to come up on top in search engines." And some have been contacted by an SEO company asking for lots of money and claiming that they can guarantee top search engine results, which in many cases is just false promises.

Google Rankings - Achieving a Top 10 Position in Google - Part 2
Achieving a top ranking position in Google is every webmasters dream. Unfortunately very few ever make it high enough for it to make a big difference on their traffic volume.

Yahoo Listing Still Worth It?
In October 2002, the Yahoo! portal changed the way it delivers search results. In the past, the most prominent results were exclusively culled from websites listed in the Yahoo directory itself.

3.5 Tips To Help You Avoid Becoming The Next Search Engine Outlaw
Want to avoid being blacklisted by the search engines and banished to the sin bin never to receive a single search engine visitor ever again? Thought so. Here's some tips to help you.

Is Google Fair?
If you are the owner of a new website, trying to get a decent ranking from the mighty google, you will no doubt answer with a resounding, NO! Recent findings indicate that Google's algorithm has an ageing filter, which put in simple terms, makes it harder for a new webmaster to get high ranking in the SERP's, in the short term at least. So does this mean google favours established sites over new ones?Broad keywords appear nigh on impossible to get top 50 rankings for, and Google's first page seems like an unattainable dream.

Are Search Engines Worth It Any More?
The "Number One" Question - the question that I (and probably every other Internet marketing expert on the planet) am most frequently asked: "How do I get to be Number One in the search engines for widgets?๏ฟฝ After all, my company is the world's leading provider of widgets - it's ridiculous that these other nobody companies are coming up in search engines ahead of us . .

See No Google, Hear No Google, Speak No Google
That's right - I dreamt of a World Wide Web without the Googlopoly. And let me tell you - it was a scary place.

Niche Marketing - Why Keyword Research Come First
A good portion of my business involves spending hours and hours using incredibly powerful but difficult to master software to uncover thousands of the exact, targeted keyword phrases people in any given niche market are typing into the search engines.When people new to the internet discover what I do and see the huge lists of keyword phrases and search data I uncover and compile, they often ask me what the heck it is used for.

Is a High Search Engine Ranking Important for YOU?
In the process of designing a website for clients the question inevitibly arises "How do I get a good search engine ranking?". This is a very good point and the answer is not as clear cut as you may think.

Search Engine Marketing: Are You Accidentally Hiding From Potential Customers?
You may be hiding if the search engines can't 'see' all of your site's relevant content.You've invested a great deal of time and effort carefully crafting compelling, helpful website content for prospective customers.

What Is Search Engine Marketing?
It's in our genes, we're driven to seek. We 'hunt' for food, homes, partners, jobs and lately - with the advent of the Internet - information.

Search Wars! - MSNs Opening Salvo
With all the recent publicity given to Google as the Internet's number one search service, it's hardly surprising that Microsoft has already started work on re-vamping their MSN search service. Okay, it's still powered by the Yahoo engine, but according to Microsoft it has been "cleaned up" and the new service mirrors much more the kind of "non-commercial" results which are currently displayed by Google.

Using Meta Tags Wisely to Attract Search Engines and Visitors
There are certain tricks and techniques in SEO industry, which can fetch you real quick and top ranking in short run and get banned for ever, which I am discussing in this article. Before optimizing any site, always follow code of ethics and never spam.

Onpage Optimization: Essential for Effective Offpage Optimization
Onpage optimization is the process by which various elements on an individual web page are structured so that the web page can be found by the search engines for specific keyword(s) or keyword phrases.Onpage optimization will not guarantee any top rating within a search engine, only offpage optimization can offer that guarantee.

Monitor Your Visibility in Google, MSN, and Yahoo with these DIY SEO Tools
This is the second part of an article series in which you'll find many tools that you can use to monitor your site's search engine position and see how your do-it-yourself search engine optimization efforts are coming along. The following tools are for monitoring your search results in the three major search engines.

Home | Site Map | Thai Hosting | Website Directory