Good Content for SEO

Having good content on your site (or blog) is a very important part of search engine optimization (SEO). It's one of the best ways to get long term success in search engine rankings. You get that success through backlinks and repeat visitors. For those of you not really worried about SEO, let me put it in different terms--you'll get more visitors to your site, and you'll keep them coming back for more.

So first, what do I mean by good content? I mean that the articles, posts, and the things you talk about on your site should be four things: (1) unique, (2) useful, (3) enjoyable, and (4) frequently updated.

Unique
If your content isn't unique, then people don't have to come to your site to see it. They can go to a different site that has the same basic content. So when you create content for your site, make sure it's something unique that can't be found all over the Web. Then people will come to your site for that content.

Useful
If your content isn't useful, then it doesn't really serve a purpose. Maybe that's a good question to ask yourself when creating content--what is the purpose of this content? Is it to answer a question that people have? Is it to gather a lot of relevant links or ideas from several different places into one article? If your content is useful, people will read it.

Enjoyable
I like to read articles and posts that are entertaining and/or interesting. Is your article funny, or does it talk about an interesting topic? Write articles that people will enjoy reading.
I think some of the spelling/grammar/layout rules fall into this category too. If your spelling or grammar is bad, it can be distracting. Edit your article before you post it. If the layout is a huge block of unending text, people won't even start reading. Split it up into sections with headings and perhaps some images.

Frequently Updated
Keep your content fresh. Keep adding new content. If you have a blog, try to post often so that you don't lose your readers. People will stop coming to your blog if you don't keep posting on it. On sites other than blogs, keep adding new articles, tutorials, or whatever your content is. New content keeps people coming back, and it opens up new pages to be indexed by search engines.

Here's an example of a blog that I've been visiting lately because it has good content. It's called the Freelance Folder. The subject material is very relevant and useful to me as a freelance web designer. The links that they post to other articles and blogs are also very useful. And most of the posts are fairly interesting.


So I hope you've learned a thing or two about content and how it fits in with search engine optimization. In summary, if you have good content, people will read it.

Marauder's Map

Remember the Marauder's Map from the Harry Potter movies? It's the map that shows you where people are at Hogwarts--you can see a banner (pennant) with the person's name on it and footsteps on the map showing where the person is walking.

Anyways, when I saw the map I thought to myself, I wonder if I could do that in Flash? So I tried it out. Actually, it turned out to probably be more trouble than it was worth, but I finished it and learned a few things at the same time.

The animation is just me walking around and stopping. You can see it here. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Rat Monster

Okay, so here's a funny post. It's my favorite video clip from scare tactics.

3d Art

Even though I'll be posting about web analytics now, I also still want to do some design-related posts. Here are some pictures of 3d pavement art done by Julian Beever. These are some of the ones that I thought were really cool.





Here's the artist's website in case you want to see more: Julian Beever.

New Blog

Well, I wasn't using this blog much before, so I'm turning it into a web analytics blog. I'm taking a web analytics class in school this semester and each of us is going to be keeping a blog and running analytics with it as well. For those of you who don't know what web analytics is, here's a definition from Wikipedia:

"Web analytics is the study of the behaviour of website visitors."

So basically, people want to know what visitors are doing on their site. How many people come to the site? How do they get to the site? What pages are they visiting? What links are they clicking, or what products are they looking at?

People use tools to find out these sort of things. Omniture is a huge player in the web analytics market, but their tools cost money. Some examples of free tools are Google Analytics, StatCounter, and SiteMeter.

So what's my purpose for taking this web analytics class? I'm very interested in web design and development. I've used a bit of analytics on my own sites with Google Analytics and StatCounter, but I want to learn more. This is a fairly new and rapidly growing field, and one that I think is very interesting and useful. Hopefully I'll be able to use the things I learn in this class in the future, either while working for a company or for my own eCommerce site.