Search-Optimized Content Pages Explained
Your web site is nothing more than the sum of its content. Whatever you are trying to say, or sell, or promote, or share – the beginning and the end of your message is all in what you put on your site. You can put up as much or as little as you want, with the only limit – or quota, since more is always better – to meet is that someone understands what you are expressing to them.
A business on the web has to be concerned with a second kind of visitor to its site, however – the search engine. Even if your site is more densely packed with information than the Miriam-Webster dictionary, it won’t do you any good if no one can find it.
For this special kind of visitor to your homepage, you need search-optimized content.
Search engines use special robots called spiders to sift through the inner workings of a page. They do not “see” the page on a monitor the way a human visitor would – they only know source code and links. Unfortunately, these important patrons cannot see any of the images or animations or design of your site, and in fact can have their progress impeded by these things.
When they scan down a page of content, they count words and links, and to put it very simply, they take a headcount of how many times certain words pop up.
If you are selling all grass-fed beef, and you have a page that describes this product, the term, “grass-fed beef” will turn up more often then, say, the term, “buggy whip.” The spider makes note of this and based on an algorithm, (that is never released to the public,) the page is chosen to come up when someone goes on the search engine and types in, “grass-fed beef,” but not when they type in, “buggy whip.”
However, it won’t necessarily come up first, or even on the first page of results. There is any number of other pages that could be using the term “grass-fed beef.”
A page optimized for search, then, is an attempt to specifically promote one or several keyword phrases to convince a search engine that this particular page deserves a higher ranking. This requires placing the keyword prominently in the page’s title and meta tags, but also in the content itself. Look at this content page for the term, Children’s Summer Camps – The title (seen on the top left corner of the browser) uses the keyword once. It also comes up in the meta tags, but not so often that a search engine would think the page is “spam.” (Search algorithms can also penalize a page it thinks is using a keyword too often.)
While there are images and tables on the page, they do not contain any of the messages that are to be conveyed to the search engine. If the text of the message were instead to be displayed in a Flash animation or an image, none of it would be seen by the search engine. All it would know is that the page had an image on it, and nothing more.
In the visible, readable content itself, “children’s summer camps” appears six times in nearly 300 words – enough that it is noticeable, but not so often to be accused of spamming. The primary audience is still the person who comes to the page, however. The page itself must still communicate to someone who wanted to find information on children’s summer camps.
After all, if the page is successful, when someone goes to Google and does a search for this, if this page is the one they visit instead of the nearly 16,000 other pages that incorporate this phrase, this will be their first exposure to the site. Simply copying a selection from, “The Lord of the Rings” and replacing, “Orthanc” with “Children’s Summer Camps” could produce the same density within the text, but it would be irrelevant, turn off the visitor to the page, and negate the usefulness of a high search ranking in the first place. Since the next challenge of a high ranking is the acquisition of inbound links from similarly-themed, high-quality websites, those links will also be hard to find with content that no one thinks is useful or relevant.
There are many other factors that go into the success of a content page: The number of inbound links from other sites, the popularity of those other sites, the anchor text used to create the links, the age of their website, the age of your website, and on and on and on.
None of this work can begin without a destination, however. While any number of non-optimized pages on your site may be completely pertinent to your business, there is no guarantee a search engine will agree with you.
For this reason, it is best to think of a search-optimized page as your attempt to put your best foot forward with any visitor to your page – human or otherwise.
