SEO Consulting, Sample Recommendation - Creating Content for SEO

A lot of what SEO is all about is the content on your website. When we say "content" we mean HTML text that can be selected with the mouse cursor. Graphics and Flash are not content in a strict sense, although that isn't to say you can't do things with either that can help with SEO efforts. But content is what is indexed by search engines, and so creating lots of content, organizing that content, and creating that content in the right way is a large part of SEO.

Content for Content's Sake?

It would make sense to create content for no other reason than for SEO, but there's no reason to limit your intent solely to SEO, and in fact your content will be better for SEO if you don't focus solely on SEO. What I mean is that if you focus on the human beings who will be coming to the site and using it, rather than thinking about SEO, you'll often get better results for SEO.

When thinking about human beings and content on a website, the three areas to focus on are:

  1. Accessibility
  2. Relevance / Usefulness
  3. Readability / Quality

Accessibility - How easy is it to find the content from the homepage or from any other page on the site? Chances are if the content is easy for a human to find it's more likely to be picked up by search engines as well. Remember that search engines and therefore humans will not always access your site from the homepage. They may click through to a secondary page of your site that is indexed in a search engine and therefore that secondary page needs to do something to address visitors who haven't seen the rest of the site. I don't mean saying "Hi there" but rather the navigation and content of each page should make sense to a human being, even if that's the first exposure they have to your website.

Relevance / Usefulness - This should be a given, but we mention it anyway. If the content has nothing to do with your website, then there's probably no reason for it to be there. I'd rather focus on the word useful. If content is useful, it's more likely to be visited, get bookmarked, get linked to from other websites, etc., and all of this builds positive SEO results.

Readability / Quality - Is your content interesting? Is it well-written? Search engines may not know the difference, but they are figuring it out, and human beings certainly do. The better your content is written, the more likely people are to trust it, to return to it, to reference it, and as with usefulness, this means better SEO results.

Now changing tracks a little bit, let's think about what search engines want to see in content. Basically, the search engines want to see the same things as human beings, but I would also add a fourth item, which is keywords. If you know what your top 10 keywords are, then you're going to want to make sure those keywords are being used liberally throughout your site. However, one should focus on items 1-3 first, and then review the content while asking the question "Are our keywords already in this content?" It very well may be that no more modifications to your content are needed to focus on keywords. Or it might be that you see opportunities here and there where keywords aren't used, but they could be without negatively affecting items 1-3.

So where does one start?

Getting Started on Content

The homepage is the most important page of your site. The content you place on your homepage is going to be more important than the content on any other page of your website. The content that currently exists on the homepage is good. It matches the criteria I've set forth above, including good use of keywords. I do have a suggestion, however.

The content in the slideshow is not being seen by the search engines. You can test this by selecting some of the content from the slidehow and then searching for it in Google with quotes around it so that it needs to be an exact match to show up. Google returns no results, although if you select other text from the page, outside the slideshow, then Google will return your page as a result. One option would be to break the content out of the slidehow and display it in a column that extends further down. This not only will make that content visible, but it's actually more user-friendly in that people don't have to click on the slideshow to view additional content, and less clicks is generally better.

As we look at the secondary pages, here are some further recommendations for developing more content:

1. Turn PDFs into HTML content wherever possible. I recognize this doesn't work for the parent resources at [client URL], but it would be fairly easy to do with the abstract and full report on [client URL]. Just turning those two PDFs into HTML would create many additional pages of content. It is true that PDFs are indexed by search engines, but HTML is better, and not just better for search engines, but many humans prefer to read an HTML page over a PDF, which many people find to be clunky and troublesome to the point that they avoid PDF files altogether. What I would recommend is providing both. Have the links go to an HTML page, but on that page have a link to the PDF so that they can save or print it if they want to.

And when turning the PDF into HTML, I wouldn't turn it into just one long page, I would have multiple pages of HTML, just as there are pages in the PDF, and let people click from one to another.

2. Create more information resources. The [client URL] area of the site is a great opportunity for providing additional content. While the PDFs are great, this section could be expanded to include all sorts of resources for parents. You could republish articles that talk about early childhood education, benefits of reading for children, etc.

3. More success stories. [client URL] is a great start, but 20 stories would be better, and the more diversity of experiences the better. And if you can get success stories from people in Canada so that you can reference the location they live in, so much the better, since Google will pick up on that.

4. Blog. If you can implement a blog on the site, that is a great way to create lots of content quickly. You can place it in a directory of the site (i.e. [client URL]) and it will get indexed as part of the site and contribute to the overall page count.

The tricky part is coming up with the strategy of the blog. One idea would be to recruit 5-10 parents and/or teachers who are willing to post at least once per week about their experiences using the software. The posts don't have to be long, but they do need to be interesting. One parent could blog about using the software in a homeschool setting, another could post about using it with a three-year old, another about using it with an eight-year old, a teacher could blog about using it in a pre-school setting, etc.

This is easier said than done, but if you can make it work then it will greatly contribute to not only your SEO efforts, but it can be a great way to show prospective customers how real people are using the software.

I think this is probably enough to bite off for now. As always, let me know if you have any questions.

-- End of Sample Recommendation --

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