search engine optimization

This article covers some common tips to improve the quality of your content both for your audience and for search engines.  It expands on our earlier Content Strategy and SEO Strategy articles.

If you haven't heard yet, Microsoft and Yahoo! have inked a 10 year deal to partner on search and advertising.  You can learn more about the details of the deal, which I won't go into here.  If the deal is approved by regulators, we could see changes in Yahoo and Bing search and advertising early next year, from the sound of it.

There are many reasons why employing a content strategist can help your website- from managing your content workflow to assessing your competitors content. But often times an organization feels just because there is content on the site that everything is okay. That may work for a while, until you start to see a measurable decline in its vital signs.

In this fifth and final article in our series on creating an SEO strategy we will tackle the topic of community. Websites are not like the "field of dreams" -- if you build it, they won't necessarily come. Certainly if you do everything right up to this point: write good content, use appropriate markup and install the right Drupal modules, the search engines will index your site. However, when you start receiving quality inbound links is when your organic search results will increase exponentially.

"There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts."

In the first article of this series ("Creating An SEO Strategy, Part 1: What Is Search Engine Optimization?") we talked about what search engine optimization means and introduced the three foundational elements of a great SEO strategy: content, coding, and community.

SEO Foundation #1: Content

Simply stated: Content is why visitors come to your website. Oh, you may entice your visitors with your standards-compliant layout and shiny logo. But after these basic introductions content will make your site sticky, and it is often what attracts your visitors in the first place.

"The Internet has no such organization - files are made available at random locations. To search through this chaos, we need smart tools, programs that find resources for us."

Search engine optimization goes beyond traditional marketing and advertising by providing techniques to help a site increase its organic traffic (visitors from search engines) by increasing relevance and assisting the indexing activities of search engines. Search engines use special software to index, or record, the content of your site. Much like library patrons who find books based on title, author, or subject, the search engines find websites based on the unique words (keywords) we type in.