ARTICLES - WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE CONTENT FOR USERS AND NOT JUST FOR GOOGLE ALGORITHMS
How many articles about search engine optimisation have you seen that highlight the importance of optimising content as part of the process of getting your site to rank highly? There must be hundreds if not thousands of blogs, web sites and other online resources stressing the fact.
Then there are experts like Bruce Clay. He provides a clear description of the SEO process for optimising a web site. His is a structured approach to SEO that is worth following. And we have done.
Although the search engine algorithms that drive SEO change on a regular basis, there are actions that, if you follow them, will help to ensure that your web site will rank higher than those web sites that don't.
And that's what we do: we define our keywords; we check on the competition; we build a list of keyword phrases and then add then into the title, description and keywords tags in the header code. And then lastly we place the appropriate density of keywords through the content.
It's what SEO is all about so that your site will rank highly when someone does a search on one of my key phrases.
But...
Having written this down, it all seems, well a bit methodical.
And scientific...
And clinical...
And boring?
Take Arkose Design. We're a web design company. We should know what we're doing and be able to achieve a high ranking. But we give less importance to having the perfectly optimised web site and concentrate instead on writing content for people. We rightly assume that very little of our business will ever come from potential clients searching the web for a web designer and then choosing us out of all the other web design companies.
Why?
After all - we've gone through the optimisation process. And we're listed in web directories and have inbound links from blogs and article directories.
And having optimised our web site, why are we not being inundated with offers of work?
Then we remember. Our key words are based around web design phrases. As are the other 10 zillion web design company sites out there.
The chances of us ever being in the top ten Google searches on our key words?
Limited.
This is us being honest.
Our clients come to us through referrals or as a result of direct marketing. So rather than writing content to help us achieve a high search engine ranking, we've written content that will encourage visitors to our site to stay and learn about what we do.
So we've focused on making the web site intuitive to use, easy to navigate and provide clear directions to the key sections of the site - our portfolio, our testimonials page and our services page. The content that we've written is (hopefully) easy to read and understandable for our key users. We want them to get as full a picture of what Arkose Design is about in the short time that they are on the site. We need them to get the key information they require, so that when we make contact we are on the same page.
Rather than just having a formulaic set of content with keyword density measured in to the nearest %age, we've focused on writing about what we do, who we are and how we do it in an informative and interesting style. It's meant to be lucid. Once written though we've tweaked the content to include key word phrases because we do hold by the principles of optimising our site. But at the end of the day, we want our users to read about us through the words we write, not service some remote but clever mathematical equation.
After all, our best visitors are human - they are the ones who sign the cheques!
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