by John Raines

Created on: February 20, 2009   Last Updated: May 01, 2009

SEO Content Maximizes Search Engine Results

SEO content can be defined as anything written for Internet publication that has been structured to improve search engine placement. Does that mean it is bad writing? No, it means that, like anything written for publication, be it magazine or newspaper, it is writing that meets the publisher's requirements.

Writing SEO content means you consciously aim at a target by including specific content so search engines will deliver it where aimed. Accomplishing that is not black magic or some esoteric practice only suitable for geeks. Anyone can consistently write effective SEO content by learning the essential elements and including them in their normal creative routine.

SEO Content Helps Search Engines

Authors are told to write for their audience. On the web that includes creating content that search engines can interpret correctly. To do that writers need a basic knowledge of how search engines "read" content.

When Google, or any search engine, crawls a web page the essence of its purpose is to determine the page topic, which is much more than simple word counts. The engine examines the text, computes word and phrase counts and applies powerful lexical logic to find important interrelations.

Google says, "our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word". Google's logic is private but reasonable assumptions can be made. Keyword placement or, as Google said, "the precise location" is significant and words that appear in prominent places are considered more important.

A hierarchy of prominence is generally assumed with titles being most important, then descriptions, next headings and finally body text. Placement also means words appearing earlier are more important than those later. So words appearing earlier in the title are more prominent, words earlier in the description more prominent and so on. There is disagreement as to whether fonts such as bold or italics add to prominence although Google's official description says they consider fonts.

Google describes a perfect search engine "as something that, understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want". Their objective in designing the search engine is to meet that goal not drive web authors crazy. The objective for SEO content should be to use keywords in a way that helps correctly identify the topic not to trick the search engine. It is ineffective for both the writer and Google

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