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Search Friendly Content

There are on page factors and off page factors that determine how your content is indexed in various search engines. First let’s cover the on page factors:

  1. Select the best keyword: In earlier volume I covered the basics of keyword research . You can use wordtracker to research keywords with search volume and relative competition to determine the best keywords to position your content. Select one or two keywords.
  2. Embed your keyword in the title of each content: Ideally you want a title that gets a persons attention. Drupal by default adds your title in a heading tag necessary for search rankings.
  3. Content: Next ensure that the keyword is listed at least once in the first 100 words of the text. Additionally you need to usually add 300-400 words of content and the content needs to have related keywords scattered through out the content. For example if your keyword were something like “breakfast corn flakes”, add things like Kellogg's healthy breakfast, other breakfast alternatives, etc. You can look up related keywords when doing keyword research using wordtracker or just use the obvious related keywords.
  4. Use meta tags wisely: Next in your meta tag add your keywords. Google and Yahoo have started ignoring the meta tags totally because people stuff them with irrelevant keywords. Some search engines penalize you for meta tag stuffing. Ensure that all the keywords you add to your meta tag are listed in your content.
  5. Keywords in your file name: Lastly add your keyword to the file name portion of the content you create

Use friendly URL names wherever possible. If you have Clean URLs enabled you can substitute the URL for any link with a friendly URL Administer » Site building » URL aliases.


Next you need to ensure that your content is set to be indexed in the search engines. There are two attributes of meta tags that allow you to instruct search engines robot behavior. One attribute is INDEX and another is FOLLOW. Index or NO INDEX determines whether your content is indexed in search engines, which most would want by default (this is the case). The FOLLOW / NO FOLLOW attribute determines whether you are passing the PR (or you a giving your vote) to external links you have specified. If you are linking to good quality website the default of FOLLOW is just fine. When you are unsure of the quality of external links you can set this attribute to NOFOLLOW selectively for the entire document. Additionally in the html code you can select a particular link to be indexed or not followed using code like this


<a href="http://www.unknownsite.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Another Page</a>

Next ensure that when you refer to your content internally on your site you link it with the same keyword rich text link. Finally you need to ensure that you content is listed in the sitemap that we will cover in the sitemap module.
Depending on the keyword competition for your keywords you may need to build external links to your content with keyword rich links. Brand new websites will take a few months before they rank for content even with all these followed. This is one of the reason why people buying existing domain names that are already known in the search engines.
Resources

Video

In this video you will see how to create content to be found by the search engines.

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