A commonly ignored factor of SEO is the web site content. You can spend hours making sure the site structure, titles and incoming links are good – but without strong content the site is unlikely to succeed.
Your text is the key to getting your pages ranked well. The words you want to rank most strongly for should generally be about one word in twenty on a page. Anything much more than this and your site risks been penalised by search engines. Much less than this and the search engines may not realise that this is the main keyword for the page.
This isn’t to say that pictures, video, animations, etc. shouldn’t be used. You can associate keywords with pictures and videos using “alt” and “title” attributes – informing search engines about their content.
Make sure the “alt” attributes are unique and describe the picture accurately in a few words. This text is also helpful for people with poor eyesight or with images turned off. Make sure you don’t use the same keywords for large numbers of pictures; this may be viewed by the search engines as keyword stuffing which can get your site penalised.
One common mistake I’ve seen are sites that are largely built with Flash. These sites can look very good – but are doomed to failure as search engines have problems picking up the text from the site and finding pages hidden by Flash navigation.
While there are techniques to get around these problems it is usually better to just use Flash for the parts of the site that actually need it. Flash can be a great tool but it has it’s place – and that generally isn’t the textual content of a site.
You should be trying to focus each page on a specific topic or keyword. This makes it much easier to achieve a high keyword density for your keywords without making the content hard to understand.
Without this focus the content can become disjointed and won’t have the impact that it could on the reader. There is no real point in somebody searching for a site if at the end of the day they can’t use it!
Don’t be afraid of using variants of a word you are trying to rank for. If you where trying to rank for the keywords ‘car repair’ then ‘car repairs’ and ‘car repairing’ would credit your site as if you had said ‘car repair’ anyway. This allows you to concentrate on making the site good for both human readers and for search engines.
At the end of the day writing the content for a web site is a matter of balance. If the page doesn’t get found by your customers then there isn’t much point in it been there. At the same time if it gets found but the text is so optimised for the search engines that your customers have a hard time understanding it then you are just as unlikely to achieve your goal. With both elements in balance you are well on your way to having a successful web site.