Chapter 8. Content is King

Search engines love content. They make their money by taking good content and serving it up to the masses. Think about it from Google's perspective. The better the content on your site, the happier the search engine user is going to be when they get there. Happy visitors will use Google again and again. The purpose of this chapter is to talk about ways that you can create fantastic content that the search engines will crawl, index, and then put in their search results. The more excellent the content on your site, the more visitors will find you. In this chapter, we're going to cover:

• What is good content

• How to write good content

• Search Engine Optimizing your content

• What to write about

• How to stay inspired

• Using Drupal to organize your content

• The right way to remove content from your site

What good content is

Good content is relevant, timely, interesting, and worth sharing with others. Content comes in many forms. It can be in the form of:

• Articles

• Videos

• Images

• Flash movies...

What good content is

Good content is relevant, timely, interesting, and worth sharing with others. Content comes in many forms. It can be in the form of:

• Articles

• Videos

• Images

• Flash movies

• Comments

• Forum posts and much more

It's also the headlines, title, subtitles, and other helper text surrounding it.

At this point in the world of search engines, content is textual. Even if you create videos or images that are high quality, the search engines use the words—the text—around those media to decide what they are and how to categorize them. This means that the written word is far more important to search engines than any other kind of media.

We'll cover video and images a bit later. For now, let's talk about writing.

Write right

The first thing to remember about writing is that you need to write well; that is, use good grammar. Write in short, catchy ideas that get people interested in what you have to say. Write content that you yourself would love to read. This helps hold your audience's interest and gets them talking about, and linking to, your content. These are all things that will help you in the search engines.

Short, catchy headlines

Start your content with a short, catchy headline. The headline is the most obvious part of any piece of content that you create. It's what reaches out and grabs the reader and keeps them interested long enough to read the first couple of sentences. Remember, most Internet readers don't read, they skim. Therefore, it's important that your headline grabs the eye and the imagination.

If your headlines are weak, and your content can't carry the team, you have a major problem. Great headlines will not only increase traffic to your web site, but they will keep visitors...

Search engine optimizing content

Just creating the content isn't usually enough to get you top billing in the search engines. You'll need to tweak it to show up on the front page of Google.

Keywords

First things first, optimize your current content for keywords. Don't force it, but incorporate them into your text where it is appropriate. Adding a keyword once in the page title, once in the headline headline, and a couple of times in the body content should be enough.

Don't stuff keywords

A common misperception by site owners is that the more keywords they use, the better their ranking will be. Repeating keywords ad nauseum will be unnatural and is a major turn-off for both search engines and visitors. You've seen it before:

Our widget is the best widget of all the widgets because Widgetco widgets build superior widgets.

Ugh! Terrible stuff. Clearly, the goal is to get some Google love, not to communicate well with the visitors. Instead, write naturally, communicating to your visitors first...

What to write about

Now that you know how to write and optimize the text on the page, what do you write about? If there is only one thing you take away from this chapter, it should be the following.

Write for your audience, not the search engines

For the long-term benefit of your site, you should create content that users will enjoy. Over time, this will give you the most SEO benefit. Beyond that, here are some guidelines:

• Use words that your audience understands. If you're writing for techies, use techie terms and don't apologize for them. If you're a techie company trying to attract non-techie customers, explain everything. Acronyms are the secret language of the clique. Only use them if you don't care if someone doesn't understand. However, you stand a good chance of alienating your audience if you do.

• Use words that will attract the right people to your site. Different words mean different things to people. Try to think like your target audience. If they're calling it a Thingy and you keep...

Using Drupal to organize your content

Drupal is not just a way to easily manage large amounts of content, it actually helps you keep that content organized and structured as well. This is a terrific asset to your SEO campaign. Search engines want to know what your site is all about: primary topics, subtopics, related headings, and so on, all help. By using the built-in Drupal tools, your site can be in top shape for the search engines.

Structure your site hierarchically

There's a reason you learned the outlining format in grade school. It's easier to organize related ideas when they're structured hierarchically. It turns out that it's easier for search engines to figure your site out when it's structured that way as well. So, send a long-overdue thank you note to your fifth grade language arts teacher and let's get organized.

It keeps things organized

Organized content is useful content. Keep similar ideas together and your site will be more useful to your visitors. It's also easy to see where...

Removing content

Not all content is good content. There will come a time when you want to take something off of your site. If you want to be friendly with the search engines, don't just unpublish the node. Search engines are crawling through your site on a regular basis and assigning value to each page. If you delete a page, you're just throwing that value away which is a loss for your site.

Take the time to do it right and you can redirect all of the search engine goodness that your page carries to another page on your site, or even to another web site entirely.

Here's a quick checklist for deleting or moving a piece of content. Before removing the node or page:

1. 1. Decide which existing page on your site will catch all of the traffic that used to go to the page you're deleting. Or, you may need to create one. This page should be in some way relevant to the old page.

2. 2. Remove or update all links to the page that appear on your site. Visitors will find those broken links and get frustrated...

Summary

Content is king! With great content comes a great result in your SEO campaign, along with a high satisfaction and conversion rate for your visitors. There are many ways to organize your content, each with its pros and cons. The key is to find the topics that are relevant to your site and stick with them.

In this chapter, we have covered the following topics:

• Good Content

• How to Write for Your Audience

• How to SEO your Content

• What to Write About

• Organizing Content

• Removing Content

In the next chapter, we'll see some cool ways to use Calais to automatically organize content and discuss how to prevent Spam.