Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, 5th Edition

Chapter 10

Bulking Up Your Site — Competing with Content

In This Chapter

Creating content yourself

Understanding copyright

Finding free material

Paying for content

Content is an extremely important factor in getting a high ranking in the search engines. Content is a geeky Web term that means, in the broadest sense, “stuff on your Web site.” A content-rich Web site is one that contains lots and lots of information for people to see, read, and use.

For search engines, content has a more narrow definition: words, and lots of ’em. So if you’re interested in search engine optimization, you should concentrate on the text part of your Web site’s content (the right text, of course, using the keywords you find out about in Chapter 6). You don’t need to worry about pictures, video, or sound — at least as far as the search engines are concerned — because those forms of content generally don’t help you get higher rankings. (Which is not to say that these things don’t have a place in a search-engine strategy — see Chapter 19 for information on using video, for instance — but it does mean that ...