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SEO Friendly Content 101

Content should be given high priority when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization.) This article will help you understand how content affects your SEO and search engine placement. To create content with profound effects on SEO, keep these three aspects in consideration:

1. Intelligent and logical placement of keywords.
2. Keep content relevant.
3.Stay focused.

Intelligent and Logical Placement of Keywords

In the early days of the Web, unscrupulous webmasters tried to stuff as many keywords as possible on a given page, making the page totally unreadable to a human, in the hopes that the search engine will rank the page higher because of the sheer number of occurrences of the keywords. Search engines soon caught on to this black hat trick and began to penalize this practice by removing the sites altogether from the index. This practice came to be known today as keyword spamming. So don't even attempt to stuff many repetitions of a given keyword on your pages. Not even a little.
A good rule of thumb is to write well for human readers. But take advantage of logical places where keywords do make sense to have. So, for example, if you have abbreviations of your keyword phrase, also include the full phrase in brackets. Use links to relevant and authoritative sources where possible. In those links include the title attribute with the keyword or phrase. When using an image in your page, use also the alt attribute with the relevant keyword or phrase. The text portion of your page should be readable to another person and keywords or phrases should appear in places where they make sense and not sound odd or too repetitive when read.

Keep Content Relevant

Relevant content has to do with regularly updated content and working outgoing links. Content doesn't need to be updated too often. On most sites, once or twice a week will have optimum effect. Blogs with daily posts will get ranked best. Search engines logically assume that a website with the same topic and SEO will get ranked better if it has most recent updates on a regular basis. Links that no longer work or are broken will reflect poorly on the relevance of the site and search engines will put less value in a site with broken or dead links.
Avoid duplicate content. Duplicate content means that the content appears somewhere else on another website already indexed. Search engines look for fresh relevant content. Duplicate content gets rejected. Although this does not result in any penalization of your website, by the same token having duplicate content has no effect on your site's SEO or search engine presence.

Stay Focused

The more keywords you try to target, the harder it becomes to reach the first page on any or all of them. So select fewer keywords that searchers are using and focus on creating content targeting those keywords. A more focused approach will result in better positioning a lot sooner for those keywords.

In future articles we will elaborate on these points and break down these aspects into more specific points.