SEO Services Homepage - Basics : Website Structure - Page Content - SERPs and the competition - Stats and Analysis - Search Engine Submission - Back Link Strategy - Webmaster Guidelines - Glossary
The hope of finding good quality on page content is the reason why most people will wish to visit a site. Visitors will expect it to be relevant to the overall topic of your site and true to the links that have led them to it. They do not want to find a copy of the current Wikipedia article, something unrelated or merely a few words on the subject, cluttered with unrelated information and ads. It's no good to them and the search engines will know this and give you little reward for your endeavours. Pertinent and good quality writing, however, will be recognised as such by humans and search engines alike and rewarded accordingly.
Original Content...
There is no substitute for original, substantial and well informed content. This is very often the webmaster's most time consuming task and there are no shortcuts when it comes to researching and writing those articles or information pages. 'Original' means previously unpublished and the work of the author, 'substantial' involves writing at length, rather than a sentence or two, and 'well informed' requires the writer to have existing knowledge of the subject and to supplement and enhance that with extensive and specific background research.
Research and reference...
As with any essay, print article, video or audio presentation, research is of huge importance unless the work is merely personal comment and opinion or a work of fiction. Research involves consulting a number of recognised authority sources, comparing and collating the information contained therein, combining it with the writer's own awareness of the topic and presenting it in a personalised manner which acknowledges the diverse range of information already out there by referencing and clearly identifying any quoted or paraphrased portions. High quality research will take up a lot of time, before a single word of the finished article is committed to keyboard, but it does pave the way for a new, original and well informed piece of work that can be uploaded to a site with pride.
Remaining consistent with the head tags and backlinks...
If your page's head tags state that the content is about MP3 players and the content is actually all about personal finance then the search engines will note this discrepancy instantly. Many years ago unscrupulous online marketers would include a host of keywords that were popular searches but wholly irrelevant to the topic of their page in the hope of attracting a greater volume and wider variety of traffic to their sites. Nowadays, however, search engine algorithms and quality standards have advanced a great deal and this kind of tactic will be heavily penalised. Your content should be precisely related to the topic you are declaring it to be on. Similarly if you have backlinks leading to your page about the Florida Rental Property market and using anchor text such as 'Florida Property Rental' the content of the destination page should remain consistent and related to that topic, and not changed at a later date to something unrelated such as 'Mesothelioma Compensation' or the likes. The search engines will see through the tactic, your visitors will be disappointed by the deception and the user experience will be diminished completely.
Minimising 'Code Bloat'...
One of the easiest ways to minimise the amout of superfluous code included within each page is to use an external style sheet. Use of CSS also allows the website admin to make sweeping changes to a whole site's fonts and colours etc with just a few changes to a single file. Instead of each block of text having the font, size and colour defined (which demands a substantial amount of code to be incuded in the page) a simple class="xyzstyle" is all that is needed. Another thing to avoid is the use of coordinate based drawn objects / shapes and absolute positioning, both of which add greatly to the quantity of code required for the page.
The 'Duplicate Content' filter...
Everyone has seen websites where information has been cut and pasted from another source, often reproduced verbatim and with scant regard for copyright notices. The website creator's misguided belief is that by publishing a large amount of content with no effort they will swiftly see some reward from the search engines. This is a complete fallacy. At best (where reproducing the work is permitted) this will be seen by the search engines for what it is, duplicate content, and at worst (where copyright is infringed) it can land the webmaster in a great deal of legal trouble. If a website and the information it contains is replicated at another domain name belonging to the original's owner, search technology will recognise this too. The tens of thousands of computers forming the infrastructure of each of the major engines have trawled, indexed and referenced the web's content for years and reproducing content that they have already seen will give little benefit as it adds nothing new to the web. Instead what it will trigger is a 'duplicate content filter' penalty, rendering the replicant information worthless.
Plagiarism, copying and copyright infringement...
Plagiarism is copying without acknowledgement, passing off of another's work as one's own. Contrary to a popular web myth it is not permissable for a site creator to take copyrighted work, reproduce it and simply add a link at the end back to the original article. This is not 'fair citation' by any definition but is most certainly copyright infringement.
RSS and XML Feeds...
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is often a great way to get legitimate and up to date third party information onto your website in a dynamic manner. It allows sites to carry complimentary content from peer sites or authority works alongside the author's own articles and opinion. Virtually every blog these days has some system whereby its posts can be syndicated, aggregated and appear elsewhere. To create a site purely around a series of third party feeds, however, will achieve little. With no actual content, other than that shown by parsing a feed from elsewhere, the site has almost no value to the search engines because nothing new and original is being added to the world wide web. If inclusion of a feed may offer your visitors something in addition to your own words then to include it is a sensible action, but it should never be seen as an easy option or substitute for creating content yourself. In all cases you should satisfy yourself that use of a feed is permitted under its usage licence; some may be used on any website, others may only be allowed on non-commercial or academic sites. Just because a feed's URL is listed does not necessarily mean that anyone may use it for any purpose they desire and it is up to you to satisfy yourself that use of a third party feed is legitimate.
eZine Articles, Article Banks and Site Stuffing...
There are a host of sites out on the web that offer thousands of free articles that the website creator may reproduce at their own site, usually providing that a statement or original author information and links are included intact. The content contained within Wikipedia, for example, is published under the 'GNU Free Documentation License' which permits information to be freely copied, modified and redistributed providing that any derivative work is published under the same conditions. The temptation, of course, is for the webmaster to see these as an endless supply of free content, work and words that can be reproduced at will and with very little effort. If, as we know, content is of paramount importance they often believe that by stuffing their site with a great quantity of this information will bulk out and enhance its standing in the SERPs. This is false. Search engines expect to see original content published at a realistic and relatively constant rate, an indicator that the site is written, maintained and updated in a natural and ongoing cycle of development. In terms of SEO 'site stuffing' brings little or no benefit as the engines will have seen the content before, often many hundreds of times before in the case of popular subjects. For a visitor the tactic offers nothing of value that they haven't seen before, or even worse a host of information unrelated to the topic that they were searching for.
SEOServices.org.uk - Search Engine Optimisation Services - Page created October 2007 - Updated ?