SEO For Dummies, 7th Edition

Chapter 13

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 website.” A content-rich website is one that contains 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 website’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 22 for information on using video, for instance — but it does mean that when you’re ...