Content is King. Content is spider food. The search engines are looking for the foremost
authority on a keyword or phrase. Do your keyword research and make sure your site has
plenty of keyword rich content high on the page that is useful to the visitor as well as
digestible to the spiders. Make use of H1, H2 and H3 headlines that contain your keywords.
Make sure your prose is natural and easy to read.
Don’t go overboard and make every other word on the page the keyword you want to rank the
page for. Stuffing the page with keywords is considered a form of spam.
Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm
Springs showroom” not “our showroom”) to help you get found in local searches.
Having terrific content will not only be great for your visitors and spiders, but it’s wonderful link
bait, too (see Links below). A blog is a great way to create fresh, new content (for the spiders
and for visitors) and attract inbound links. The more good content you put on a blog, the
bigger the blog gets. The bigger the blog, the more relevant it will become to the search
engines. For some, a blog can completely take the place of a standard web site.
Also, use Flash animation and images sparingly. Spiders are getting better at reading Flash
and pictures, but they are still better with text.
5. Duplicate Content
Let’s say you have a site that sells a thousand different types of widgets and the pages are all
built from the same template with the same text and the only difference is the model of widget
on the page. What could happen is that the search engines will not see enough difference in
the pages to consider them unique and will rank what it considers the best single page and
dump the rest.
To avoid duplicate content issues, make sure all of your pages have unique Title Tags, Meta
Tags (see below) and text, in this case probably in the form of product description text.
And, if you are writing articles for distribution to the various article sites for mass distribution (a
great way to get back links), be sure to publish the article on your own site first and give the
spiders a chance to crawl it. That identifies you as the originator of the content. Then push the
article out for distribution across the web, making sure you have a link back to your site in the
article content.