Content and coding

The content of a page – meaning the words within that page – have a huge impact on how well a page ranks for given keywords. If your target keywords don’t appear on your page, you will have a hard time ranking highly for that keyword. It’s not impossible, but I’ll get to that later. Relevant content has to be within your page – as code (meaning not as an image) – for search engines’ crawlers (the robots that read your pages) to read that content, and rank you for the appropriate keywords. This is a strong reason why Flash websites do poorly on search engines, and former print designers that just slice up a design on a WYSIWYG program make poorly-performing websites: the real content gets locked away, where crawlers can’t access it.

It’s also essential to use good coding practices in building your pages. There are standards for writing HTML content, and they help rank chunks of content within a page in order of importance. This helps search engines know the difference between the important – and less important – information on a page, and thus rank that page for various keywords.

Following is a run-down of important content-based factors that dictate how your pages rank on search engines.

content plays a big role in a site success, if the visitors find your content useful they tend to visit it again