Getting Read: Web Content and Search Engine Optimization
The great shuffle has begun. With the new search engine algorithms taking over, every web marketing master and maven has to re-evaluate their web content, and the web content of their clients or risk being lost in the chaos. Fortunately, there are ways to keep your proverbial house of cards from falling down and it isn’t as difficult as you may think.
How to Recover
The fact of the matter is, the clich “Content is King” has never been more factual than right now. In an effort to clean up the trash on the web and produce more relevant search results, the search engine crawler rules for web content have become more strict. If a website has articles that have duplicate content or are poorly written — or in some cases just a bunch of gibberish — the crawlers penalize the site, therefore dropping their rank.
How to Optimize Content
If you’re a hands-on kind of person and you have the time, you can create your own search engine optimized articles. You’ll want to begin by choosing your keywords wisely. If you choose a keyword that is highly competitive, your rankings might suffer. The next tip is making sure your keyword density is between 2 and 5 and you never want to exceed that limit or the search engines may see it as keyword stuffing and penalize your site. A good rule of thumb is to have the keyword in the first sentence of the first paragraph, somewhere in the last paragraph, and a few times in between depending upon the word count.
Does this sound a little scary to you? When all else fails, hire a professional writer to get you started. There are several content providers and freelance sites out there that provide quality content with SEO expertise. However you proceed, just keep in mind that quality is the key to unlocking high rankings.