If you ask me what is the most important key to search engine positioning, my answer is content.

Why? For a few good reasons.

After all, what search engines index are content. Over the years, we have witnessed how search engines algorithms are better and better in judging the quality of the page. I am confident that future search engines will reward good content more than anything else.

When people enter keywords in search engines, they are searching for content. The content is of little to no value if it can’t satisfy the thirst of information the visitors search for.

Content is Key to Success in SEO

Enough said. What makes people read is content. What makes other web publishers link to you is content. What makes big directories to consider your submission is still overall quality of your site or in other word, content.

People can build up their link popularity by buying links, but still at least they have to own solid content for visitors to convert.

Search engines are there to satisfy searchers. If what searchers want are content, then content is what search engines want from website owners.

Content Hooks Visitors

Visitors have shorter and shorter attention span. Why should they read your pages if other pages, probably those are more useful, are a hop or two away? In their head, they are thinking “What’s in it for me?” and pay no attention to you, how great your product is and how great your company is.

Know Your Keywords

Do research on what keywords or key phrases visitors used in history to find your sites or other similar sites in your industry.

Keyword should be natural to web pages nowadays. No longer you must have a precise amount of keywords and keyword density in a page. Contrarily, you should write naturally, add synonyms and theme keywords, scattered all over the content.

In other words, you should know your keywords, and write with that in mind but don’t force into stuffing too much keywords in every paragraph.

Introducing the Era of User-Generated Content

The time has come when not only web publishers have the capability to publish information. All web readers could as easily setup a blog and start posting.

User-generated content also become very popular nowadays. Think about amateur publishers who make a living by blogging and podcasting.

Readers can now participate in a more interactive fashion on websites by using blog comments. They can now add value, expound and rebut to any piece of content easier than ever. Used right, this can be a powerful force that will not only allow you to bond closer to your readers and audiences, but also shorten sales cycle.

Those are topics of another post though.

Content comes in different formats. Audio and video contents are here now. They are growing in record speed. Think YouTube. Perhaps, you can also add articles, frequently asked questions (FAQs), interactive games, tools, and so forth.

Conclusion

Good content is the only reason why your visitors want to dive in deeper to your website. Taking the time to constantly build useful content will pay off. Search engines will come more often to crawl more and deeper pages and you will get value in returning visitors.

Meta description and meta keyword tags are two other components in the header tag of a HTML page. Like the title tag, they were over abused — but to some extent these tags were abused even more. It used to be effective to have your pages rank high in search engines just by stuffing target keywords repetitively.

Back then, search engines only see a few places to determine if a page is relevant. The Web consists only of a handful popular domains. There were still ample of untapped keywords. Those days are long gone though.

Meta tags look like these:

<meta name="description" content="the description of the page here">
<meta name=keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3">


The value of the meta description and meta keyword tags have diminished considerably over the years. In fact, I write this article just for the sake of completeness, with one extra benefit. I still witness people stuffing keywords to these tags even to this date. If you are one of them, then stop wasting time and focus on other factors.

Right now, only small search engines are looking for meta keyword and meta description tags. I believe, they will shift their focus too as soon as they realize they spend too much time to make use of this code while their time could be better spend at recognizing other components of the page or off-page factors.

Writing meta tags for each and every page you create is just a waste of time. If there is a value in that, it isn’t significant.

Don’t be surprised if new web sites and pages created nowadays neglect these tags completely.

If you persist, don’t stuff these tags with unnecessary and repetitive keywords or keyphrases, or you will more likely be accused as a web spammer. Come up with succinct description and a short list of important keywords and unique words that describe the page and pay more attention to the content and promotion instead.

Those are all I have to say about meta tags.

What is a title tag?

It is part of a HTML page that tells a browser what to display in the browser’s title bar.

Title tags are also very important to search engines. If web publishers consistently give the right title tag to a page, then the tag should indicate the subject of the page. But, there is no guarantee on this. Many web writers prefer to put a clever title. Others simply intend to cheat the search engines, realizing how important the title tag is.

Despite this fact, still this tag can tell us much about a page. This factor is less significant than inbound links. The benefit of it though is that you have full control of what you want the title tag to appear.

To view title tag of a web page, simply use the “View Source” feature of your browser. It looks like this:


<html>
<head>
<title>The title of the page</title>


There are three major mistakes that webmaster could make with title tags:

1. Failing to include a title tag. Browsers are very forgiving. You can create just body content of the page and still it will display correctly in most browsers. I have seen to this date many web publishers still forget this piece of information. This should not be a problem if you use content management system or a blog though.
2. Poor title that gives no value. Remember, while human visitors rarely see the title in the browser title bar, the exact same line appears in search engine result pages. It should not only be compelling to search spiders but also to human visitors, so they click to visit the page. I also often see web publishers use the default “Untitled page” — as commonly appear as default on some HTML editors and website templates — as the title. Change it to reflect the content of your page and use copywriting technique to make it clear and appealing.
3. Use excessive words or characters. Title tags should be short, between 30-60 characters. That is just a guide, it can be as long as it needs to be to deliver the message, but no longer. Search engines trim long titles though. Avoid only displaying company names. Put it at the end of the title if it must be there or the brand is popular.

A short summary about title tag

Although many people have differing opinions about title tags, most of them agree that the tag is important for SEO. Long gone are days when stuffing keywords into title tags would result in better search engine positioning. Search engines are wiser nowadays.

However, anyone who is doing SEO should start with on-page factors. Title tag is one of them. Keep title tag succinct and clear, but at the same time compelling.

If you create sitemap files to get search engines better crawl your sites, then I have a good news for you. Now there is a features called “Sitemap Autodiscovery.”

What is it and what it does?

Sitemap autodiscovery, as the name implies, is the feature for search engine crawlers to find the URL to the sitemap for the crawled site. The implementation is actually in the robots.txt file, usually to control access from search engine spiders to site files and directories, among other things.

Here is how you use it:

Sitemap: <location_of_the_sitemap>

Currently, not all search engine robots support this directive or consume sitemaps yet, but soon all will benefit from this. It is a good idea if you use sitemap, to add a new directive to your robots.txt.

For now though, keep doing the old methods of submitting sitemap files:

• By using search engine’s submission interface.
• By pinging search engines through HTTP request.

Sitemaps.org is a site for the Sitemap protocol. The latest version, Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlinke Creative Common License and has wide adoption, including support form Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Link buyers, beware! Google now is very close to providing a special form for paid link reports at some point in the future. It all began when Matt Cutts heard at SES London that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically.

Here is a tip on how to do this right now, directly taken from his blog:

• Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authentic spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.
• Use the authenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlink” (all in one word) in the text area of the spam report.

You can report sites that are both buying and selling links, preferably with a link to the page that demonstrate the case.

The Google team now is testing new techniques and need some real feedbacks from the community. A good move, Google.