Bernie | 
01 20th, 2007| 
Writing Search Engine Friendly Content
One of the topics I see discussed in great detail is how to write content for a website that will be indexed by search engines. One thing I do agree with is that writing content for the visitor is the most important consideration. But, is also a bit of a balancing act that sometimes is required in writing content for search engine optimization. The issue is that when we do our research and we identify the keyword terms and phrases which are being searched, writing content to include the exact phrases isn’t alway easy. The most common complaint I hear is that it is not “natural” to write content for words which are sometimes used in obscure ways in search engines.
The Balancing Act
So, how just do you write content that doesn’t feel natural? Well, remember that not all the content you write has to be on the navigation system of your website. You can write content which is available, but limited to a section of your website which is not part of the heavy traffic, or mainstream. As long as the content and the web page follows conventional website architecture guidelines, we’re not talking about anything that would be considered spam or not acceptable (I would never suggest such a thing). What we’re talking about is offering content which is very search engine friendly and allowing visitors to those pages to navigate your site from that page.
The Side Door
In other words, sometimes a visitor to your website can enter through the side door rather than the front door. Here’s an example. If someone finds this page based on its content about website development and search engine friendly guidelines, I’m pleased. This page is not in the main navigation. It is located in my Resources section. This page is also linked from the sitemap. It uses all the conventional website and search engine friendly attributes, it’s just not a page you can navigate to from the main menu system, but you can find it in the sitemap. This is a perfectly legitimate method of writing content which is friendly to search engines.
Be Creative
You can probably think of many ways to write content on relevant topics above and beyond the typical description of your products, services, news, events, about, etc. Break down the topics on your website into many sub-topics and write about them. Don’t worry about where you’ll place the content. Just write the content, and you can figure that out afterward. In other words, don’t over analyze it. Just write the content. The more content, the better.
