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10.3 How to optimize content for search engines

Your content will not be useful if it cannot be found! When writing content keep in mind search engine optimization. Use keywords in your text that will reflect the kinds of terms that your target audience would be searching for - especially in your headlines, subheadings, page titles and near the top of your content.

Include your keywords in header tags H1, H2, H3

Search engines sometimes consider words that appear in the page headline and subheadings to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags. Do not expect the search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines - it will not. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine.

<h1>Trade Capacity Building</h1>
<h2>Trade Capacity Building Programmes</h2>
<h3>Current</h3>

Make sure your keywords are in the first paragraph of your body text

Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document - where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. However, you do not want to artificially stuff keywords here. More is not better. For example Google might expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5 - 2 percent for a word that should rank high, so do not overdo it. Other places you might consider including keywords would be in ALT tags and perhaps COMMENT tags inserted in the HTML. For example:

COMMENT: <!-- FAO News & Highlights -->

Use keywords in hyperlinks

Search engines attempt to calculate the focus of your page. Words hyperlinked in your body text are weighted as potentially important by search engines, so hyperlink your important keywords. To add further emphasis, name the page you are linking to with the same keyword or key phrase..

Other ways to optimise your content for search engines

  1. Cultivate a steady inbound link growth
  2. Keep expanding the site with relevant content and keep important pages fresh
  3. Show the same content to search engine crawlers as you do to users (this is a point for database driven Web sites)
  4. Provide alternative language versions of your content
  5. Avoid linking to bad domains by using the "no-follow" tag - this is useful for forums and blog comments where users can freely submit URLs.

Further reading

For a good summary of important search engine ranking factors, check out:

Likewise, good resources also include: