Page 6

The Importance of Page Content

The content of a page is probably the most important consideration when building traffic to your web site. Other techniques do gain more traffic but page content and content of your web site in general is most important when producing a good quality site that will naturally build traffic.

1.1 General guidelines for a page For a page to rank well with the search engines, the page should be optimized and have sufficient text that is of relevance to your visitor. Ideally the page will be written and presented to be easy to read. It will have a good use of white space and placing of text blocks and pictures (graphics).

The text you write should be warm and compelling. It should flow well so it is easy to read and be in short paragraphs so interest is easy to maintain.

The content you place on the page should be reflected by the page name, title, the H1 heading, description and meta tag keywords. 1.2 Page Content As the number of pages on the web increases, it is becoming more difficult to achieve a high page ranking. There is much you can do and the most important consideration is the content on the page. Search engines are becoming more specialized at looking at the page as a whole and ranking the page on the basis if its content rather than just the title, meta tag keywords and the description. The text or copy on the page is now becoming the most important feature with the all the properties of the page being used to judge its ranking.

This is good from our point of view. Let me explain. If we are interested in creating a page that is relevant to our site visitor then the copy of the page will contain accurate and compelling information about its topic. The page will naturally rank higher than other less well constructed pages. If our pages are the best we can make them, when compared with much poorer pages, our pages will rapidly rise in ranking.

When a search engines refers a visitor to your page, they will record the time that they spend at your site (as long as the visitor clicks back to the search engine). This information is used to rank pages. If your visitor stays longer on your site compared with other sites, your page ranking will naturally improve.

So creating pages that are “sticky” will help ranking and in turn increase traffic to your site.

This is a short piece taken from my eBook on Web Site Traffic Building techniques. My eBook summarises the best techniques I have used over the last three years in creating successful commercial sites.

The full eBook is available from http://www.web-site-traffic-building.com

Nigel Stephens is a Microsoft MCP and has extensive experience in creating database driven web sites such as http://www.usb-products.com that are commercially successful. His eBook of the best techniques for developing targeted traffic is available from http://www.web-site-traffic-building.com