Search Engine Optimization: For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4. Making Your Site Useful and Visible

In This Chapter

• Understanding the basic rule of Web success

• Knowing why search engines like content

• Making your site work for visitors and search engines

Obviously, it's important to create Web pages that search engines will read and index, pages that you hope will rank well for important keywords. But if you're going to build a Web site, you need to step back and figure out what purpose the site should serve and how it can accomplish that purpose.

Creating a useful site is the key. Even if your sole aim is to sell a product online, the more useful the site is to visitors, the more successful it's likely to be. Take Amazon.com, for instance. It certainly wasn't the first online retailer of books and music, or any of the other products it offers. But one of Amazon's real strengths is that it doesn't just sell products; it's a really useful site, in many ways:

• It provides tons of information about the products it sells. The information is useful even if you don't buy from Amazon.

• You can save information for later. If you find a book you're interested in but don't want to buy right now, save a link to it and come back next month, next year, or five years from now.

• Other site owners can become partners and make money by promoting Amazon.

• Other businesses can easily sell their products through Amazon.

• You can read sample chapters, look at tables of contents, listen to snippets of music, and so on.

• You can read product reviews from both professional ...