Ever since the beginning of the search-engines dominated Internet, the importance of keywords and key phrases has remained undiminished. Although PPC and other technologies have tried to take precedence over them, they have remained the tool of the masses to get found on the search engines. Millions of searches are conducted every month using Google, Yahoo!, MSN and other mediums. Those who can pay, bid for positions and clicks. Those who cannot, or don’t want to, optimize their websites for the relevant keywords.
Optimized content is rapidly gaining prominence throughout the world. It is written in such a manner that it is liked both by the readers and the search engine robots. The content is woven in such a manner that keywords and key phrases are repeated again and again without sounding repetitive or nonsensical.
But why write such content? Especially why should it be important to those webmasters who can pay for every click or who can bid for ranking? There are a few good reasons why your website needs optimized content.
OPTIMIZED CONTENT HELPS YOU FOCUS
When you try to write your web page content both for search engines and for humans, you work hard to focus on the relevant subject. If you get 10000 visitors everyday and no sale takes place or they don’t stay over 30 seconds, then, although you have made maybe the search engines happy, your website is making no sense to the visitors. On the other hand, if you have remarkable copy but don’t have enough keywords to attract the search engine robots, then you might not be covering the subject in the right manner and people looking for that particular keyword may found confounded. In this case not even pay-per-click will work. So if you write both for search engines and for humans, there is a better chance you will write optimized content.
OPTIMIZED CONTENT HELPS YOU ORGANIZE
Optimized content not only helps you focus, it also helps you organize your web pages in a better way. Ideally, a single web page should be optimized for not more than three words and key phrases. This way, you don’t try to put all the eggs in the same basket (ok, this expression has been beaten to pulp I know). If you restrict yourself to just a few keywords, you can write more about them without making your reader scroll down a lot.
OPTIMIZED CONTENT HELPS YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR VISITORS
Why should people be looking for you? This I write from my personal experience. I spent more than a year optimizing my website http://www.amrithallan.com for “copywriting”. For more than a year the website remained on the first pages of Google and Yahoo!. But did I get business? Not at all. Why? I was targeting the wrong keyword. People searching for “copywriting” were not looking for a content writer, they were looking for articles and tips on copywriting. Instead, I should have optimized for “web page content writer”, or I should have optimized for “website content writer”, or something like that. My change of key phrases not only got me good ranking, it also increased my business.
OPTIMIZATION HELPS YOU FINETUNE YOUR PAGE SOURCE
Relevant content of your web pages should be accessible to search engine robots as soon as possible when they are trying to “crawl” your website. When you optimize your web page, you should also get rid of the unwanted junk code such as formatting tags and fancy, good-for-nothing JavaScripts. For formatting your web pages, use external style sheets as much as possible. Put all your JavaScripts in another file and call the script from there, and if possible, insert the script at the end of the page rather than in the beginning of your page.
If you optimize the source of your web page properly, you can reduce its size by more than 40%-60%.
At this point I would like to end the article. This subject is as wide as you can make it, and this is just a beginning. Gradually webmasters are realizing the importance of optimized content. Good, talented writers are needed to write optimized content because your command over the language has to be really good in order to manipulate the words the way to orchestrate the desired result.
Amrit Hallan is a freelance copywriter,
and a website content writer. He also dabbles
with PHP and HTML. For more tips and tricks in
PHP, JavaScripting, XML, CSS designing and
HTML, visit his blog at
http://www.aboutwebdesigning.com
