By Robert Lockard
Content is king. If you don’t have great content on your website, you’ll probably never have much success attracting Web traffic.
In my last blog entry, I talked about the importance of using search engine optimization in your ecommerce strategies. But how exactly do you do search engine optimization? That’s the $64,000 question. This is the first of a series of steps you can take to get on the right track to the top of search engines, like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Some of these are fairly common-sense, but others might require a little more in-depth knowledge of Web design. Experts in eHarbor’s divisions, Magellan Commerce, Submit Solution, Real Estate Promoter and Direct Home Find, are a great resource for figuring out all of the complex details of SEO.
The first, and most important, step to achieving SEO is to create content that is relevant and interesting to your customers. Writing content that grabs the right people’s attention and gives them something of value is the best thing you can do to get them to your site. Otherwise, people won’t see any reason to come back to your site, even if it pops up first on search engines.
Having a great-looking website with good organization is important, but filling that site with excellent content is where the most essential work lies. You must research who your targeted audience is and what their main concerns and questions are. Then create content on those topics to answer their questions so they will see you as an authority on the subject. Another benefit of having great content is that it will get the attention of other
bloggers/webmasters, persuading them to link to your site. This is the best offsite way to achieve SEO. It can’t be just any content, though; it has to be high-quality content, if you want to gain respect and business.
Good grammar and spelling are also a big part of creating good Web content. If your text is littered with glaring spelling errors, you won’t look like an expert, no matter how good your research or information is. For example, check out this article from the New York Times entitled “Economy Shed 598,000 in January.” I noticed several problems with the grammar and punctuation of this article, causing me to question how much I can trust the information in it. Here are some of the problems:
- In the third and tenth paragraphs, “Over all” is used when “Overall” would be the correct term.
- In the ninth paragraph, we find this: “average weekly earnings climbed $614.72, up $1.67.” I believe the author meant to say “average weekly earnings climbed to $614.72, up $1.67.” Otherwise, that would be an incredible jump of both $614.72 and $1.67.
- In the twelfth paragraph, they forgot to put an a in “the new report offered no hint that bottom was in sight.” I checked back a little after the article was published and I noticed they had fixed this error, so that’s a good sign.
- The author forgot to put a period at the end of the last sentence of the eighteenth paragraph.
These are all fairly minor errors, but they show that even the work of the New York Times, which has the benefit of being edited by some of the top editors in the business, can still have mistakes. It appears that they corrected almost all of these mistakes in their updated version, so it’s nice to see they take care of quality after the fact. The point is that you should not only do your homework and add relevant content to your website regularly, but you should also make sure that what you put on your site meets the quality standards your readership expects.
As I mentioned at the beginning, this is just the first part of this series. We’ll cover several other ways to achieve SEO in upcoming blog entries. Be sure to come back to the eHarbor Blog often for updates. I am indebted to Google’s SEO Starter Guide for much of the information in this blog entry. The photo of the lion is from Flickr and it is the copyright of law_keven.
But there are several steps you can take before you go to the experts to make sure your site does precisely what you want it to. These steps come from an Examiner article entitled, “Website design starter plan for clients.” That article has horrible spelling and grammar, but it has a few good ideas I want to share, so I’ll cut its author a little slack.
Journalism is a thankless job.
