Recently we have been focussing heavily upon the importance of content on your website. It is always useful to bear in mind that the search engines can only read text so even if your website has relevant pictures, logos and colour schemes, whilst they may be pleasing to the eye they will do nothing to aid your search engine rankings. Alt tags can show the search engines what keywords your pictures are relevant for, however, paragraphs of text are paramount for the success of your website on the search engines. We have already seen how to write content for your site in a recent post but here I shall focus on the importance of nice specific content.
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Google Local Searches
A common problem that small businesses often face is that they don’t have the budget required to pursue an SEO campaign that targets generic terms such as restaurants or florists due to the high traffic volumes associated with these keywords and hence the high competition that naturally follows.
In order to get the most out of a small budget it is often the case that long tail keyphrases are targeted. Whilst these phrases have significantly less search engine traffic, the right phrases can be profitable due to high relevancy, which as a result, increases the chance of converting a prospect into a customer. Long tail keyphrases should always be targeted wherever possible due to this increased relevancy from the initial search to your product or service, however, due to a recent Google development it may be possible for small businesses to benefit from generic search phrases without having to set aside a huge budget for SEO.
SEO Versus Brand Value
A long standing issue that small businesses and business in their infancy have had to deal with is how to decide how much time and budget to spend on developing their brand awareness and how much time and money to invest in search engine optimisation. With the increasing amount of prospective customers turning to the Internet, and more specifically the search engines, to find what they want it is becoming ever more tempting to set aside more and more time and money for the purposes of search engine marketing (SEM) to secure a healthy slice of the search engine traffic and the search engine sales. However, there is a worry about this approach that I feel is necessary to highlight.
The Importance of Writing Natural Content
The goal of copywriters is to write copy, which keywords are embedded into so the search engine spiders crawl them and give the site in question a ranking boost for the keywords in question. Keyword promotion is the reason why content is so important for Search Engine Optimisation. As a result, the danger every copywriter faces is writing robotic copy that looks unnatural and contrived. With the main purpose of writing articles being keyword promotion there are times in which it is necessary to bend phrases, sentences and sometimes even paragraphs, just so that all important keyword can be placed within the article. It is necessary to do this when the keyword in question doesn’t naturally fit into the piece of copy it is to be included in. You may ask what is wrong with creating robotic text if the search engines are happy and your site is ranked well for your chosen keywords and I shall answer you.
Looking ahead to HTML 5
Currently, all important content, is mostly found within either a <div> or a <span> HTML tag. I cannot emphasise the importance of content from an SEO perspective enough but here I shall focus on the HTML tags the content is found within. You may ask what is the importance of what tag is used for your content? Now there may not be a huge difference but in the future it seems that the HTML tags your content is found within may have a significant impact upon Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and your website.
