A good website is best described in terms of the content it offers. The content should convey the subject, functions and the objective of the website. Internet surfers would like to visit a website more than once if the content of the site exactly matches the subject of their interest. From this it is clear, that good content always prompts users to visit more often thereby generating the necessary traffic. The content forms the backbone of any site. A site visitor would immediately leave the web page if the necessary and useful information he is looking for is not available. Even an extremely visually appealing site will suffer if the right content is not available. Content is the king any day and is the core element on which every web site should be based.

In terms of search engine optimization, the content of a website forms an integral part in formulating an effective search engine optimization strategy. The content is the heart and soul of a website and is a breadwinner in accomplishing a top search engine positioning. Search engine robots and spiders have now become intelligent and judge a site by the content it offers. To achieve top search engine rankings in modern search engines, one must include as much useful content as possible and wherever necessary in the website. Now let us go through the various steps and procedures involved in content management.

What constitutes search engine friendly content ?

Now let us discuss the basic building blocks of search engine optimization viz. Keywords and key phrases. The first guideline is to identify the most popular keywords and include them in the text as many number of times as possible without sounding repetitive. The keywords and phrases should be relevant to the topic the page describes and should be placed at the top of the page. Most search engines rate a web page by looking at the Keyword density, which is the number of keywords per page and the Keyword frequency, which is the number of times a particular keyword is repeated in a page. Ensuring sufficient keyword density and keyword frequency levels will enhance the chances for better search engine ranking. To achieve keyword density, consider two to three important content-based keywords and key phrases per page and scatter these keywords and phrases along the length and breadth of the page with more number of keywords placed at the beginning of the page. To achieve keyword frequency, repeat the selected keywords and key phrases about five to seven times in the page. That is, each keyword should appear at least 5 to 7 times in the page. The other important factor is Keyword positioning which is the position of the keywords in the page.

Many search engines do not crawl the entire page but only the first few lines. In this context, it is a good idea to place keywords or phrases at the beginning of the page, as search engines would be able to rank high the page if the necessary keywords and phrases are found. Keyword proximity, which is defined as the distance between two keywords or phrases, should also be kept in mind while preparing the content for your page.

Insist on placing useful and meaningful hyperlinks to the internal pages or to external pages somewhere between the content in your page, as these links would tremendously boost your search engine rankings. Usage of user-friendly navigation links across the web pages and outside the website would have immense impact in attaining top search engine rankings. Add meaningful tool tip texts to these links, which best describe the destination topic. Try to incorporate keywords as part of the link text. Having hyper links in the web page adds to the link popularity of the website.

Formatting of content

Basically, any web page comprises title or headings, which compactly describe the content of that particular page. Include these headings in the header tags like H1, H2 etc. as almost every search engine checks for these header tags. Make it a point to have at least one header tag per page in the whole of your web site. Format the text in the page by including the formatting tags like Bold, Italic, Underline, and Align. These tags are heavily weighed by search engines and increase the chances of top search engine placement. It is not just sufficient to have a junk of words in the body content but to also make them visually appealing and meaningful. Stress the most important keywords and key phrases by including them in format tags. For instance, if the keyword is conveying about a title or a name of an organization, highlight the same using the bold tag. Similarly, use the italic and underline tags wherever you feel appropriate. Sometimes it is necessary to align some paragraphs or sentences to the center; for example, a title or a sub heading. To achieve this functionality use the align attribute which aligns to the left, center or right. Highlight the identified keywords and key phrases using bold, italic and underline tags as most search engines do weigh them heavily and the chances of achieving top search engine rankings will be high.

Finally, we can conclude that for optimal search engine optimization, the content forms a constructive role in achieving top search engine positioning and ranking and various important factors like formatting of text, keyword density, keyword frequency, keyword positioning, keyword proximity and link popularity would add up in achieving a top search engine ranking.