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Getting Ranked 3 of 5

Content is key when optimizing your website for search engines. In order for search engines to rank your site, they have to see that your content is relevant to the keywords it is looking for. There are five main ideas to keep in mind when optimizing content for search engines: Quality, Uniqueness, Relevance, Themes, and Keyword Density.

Quality

The first thing you should watch out for when optimizing content is that you shouldn't lose sight of your visitors. When you write content, write it for the readers and not the search engines. The reason visitors are on your site is to see what's there. Content that has been exclusively written to make search engines happy will be bare and uninteresting. Make sure you don't fall into this trap.

Also, make sure that your content is grammatically correct and without errors. Search engines have sophisticated algorithms which allow them to look at your content in detail and they will recognize mistakes and rank accordingly. This should go without saying, but knowing that both search engines and visitors are noticing mistakes should drive you to keep problems to a minimum. They are after quality, you should be too.

Uniqueness

There are two facets to this Uniqueness. One is to make sure each page on your website is unique. This relates back to the previous post on code regarding meta description tags and ensuring that the search engines don't think that most of your pages are duplicates. The screenshot below illustrates this problem because Face book has 53 unique pages but according to Google only three are unique. Make your content unique and let the meta description tags do their work.

The second facet to having unique content is making sure that your content is different from other websites in your industry. In order to get ranking you need to show the search engines that you are not the same as the other five competitors. There have been numerous times when I read content on one SEO website and swore that I had read the same thing on a different site. Unfortunately, I probably read something that was saying the same thing but in different words. Try not to make this mistake because it will hurt your ranking. Your content can be unique in a variety of ways and innovation and creativity are a good place to start.

Relevance

The overall goal of search engines is to provide relevant results and this concept should be obvious for optimizing your content. Keep in mind however that search engines are also looking for related words or phrases on your website. If you run a florist website and are working on the keywords "buy roses", remember that search engines might be looking for "flowers", "florist", or "bouquet". This could give you some flexibility with your content so you don't feel like you have to load the same keywords all over your website. (Which will be detrimental anyhow)

Themes

Writing one page of content that is quality, unique, and relevant to keywords isn't enough to get you ranking. Even with perfect execution of the previous points, search engines still need to see more. They will look for quantity as well and you need to make sure that there are several pages related to the keywords you want. Search engines can recognize themes and will rank websites that have more content on keywords higher. For example, imagine you are that florist again and only have one product page on roses. This page might have great content that is relevant to roses, but a website that is 100% dedicated to roses will get ranked higher. (Assuming everything else is equal) Keep this in mind with your website and make sure you can compete at this level for your keywords.

Keyword Density

Going back to the florist example, that site owner may want to begin throwing the keyword "Roses" all over the place. This is basically taking advantage of using keyword density to get ranking. Keyword density is the number of times a word is on a page as a percentage of total words. If there are 100 words and "Roses" shows up ten times, the keyword density for "Roses" is 10%. This doesn't mean that you can lace your entire site with keywords, so be careful. Search engines recognize that as keyword spamming and will penalize you for it. The best way to get an appropriate keyword density is look at your competitors. Keep your keyword density around theirs but not so high that it will attract negative attention from the search engines. If they have a keyword density of 2% you can try 3%, but don't go as high as 10%. This can vary but is usually a good rule of thumb.

Also, keep in mind that Search engines look at keyword density over the entire website. Again, one page isn't going to do the trick. They want to see a lot of relevant content in order to rank you higher than another site. The trick is to accomplish this without keyword spamming on your entire site. Chances are, if your website is truly relevant to those keywords then you won't have that difficult of a time optimizing keywords in your content.

Here are some tools that will show you the keyword density of your web pages.
Meta Tag Analyzer
Bruce Clay SEO Tools

Overall, content is extremely important with search engine optimization but can also be one of the trickiest to accomplish. There are few set formulas you can follow and the entire process is somewhat of a battle with yourself. You need to create content that the search engines will see as relevant, but you don't want your content to look like that to your readers. The best way to approach this is to make sure that you are doing your site justice with the search engines and try to keep all of these things in mind. Don't create content out of these concepts, use these concepts to optimize the content you already have.