Win The Battle Of Relevancy Online With Custom Content

It's a dog eat dog world out there on the Internet. There is the capacity for an unlimited number of storefronts on the web that you'd never be able to find on main street. The fact is that there is even more competition for business online than there is in the brick-and-mortar world. This is only going to get more intense. It wasn't so long ago that many people were afraid to use credit cards online. Shopping online was a curiosity. Now, it's a given.

The battle of relevancy online is the battle of one site being more useful than another. In the growing virtual marketplace, it isn't nearly enough to just have a number of products and hope for the best. Look at Amazon.com reviews—they are core to what has made that site grow. A glowing Amazon review can do a lot for a product's sales. Web surfers use Amazon reviews as much as they use a review in the local paper, if not more. Reviews have made Amazon a relevant and trusted resource for a department store's worth of products.

Not every site can hope to have the same review structure as Amazon. A number of affiliate sites use Amazon reviews as their own content. Web surfers are getting savvy to this: they can smell an affiliate site. Why not just go to Amazon directly? The battle for relevancy, then, is to become something as trusted and vital as the major sites online. You can't necessarily wait around for people to write reviews, and the process may not even apply to your site, so a site owner needs to provide content of your own.

Another word for relevancy is usefulness. It has been shown that the longer a person sticks around on a site, the more likely he or she will make a purchase. Even if that person doesn't make a purchase the first time to the site, the site will have left an impression. People are looking for information on a product or service as much as they are looking to make an immediate purchase. Web surfers like to be informed shoppers and the web gives them an unlimited amount of places to get this information.

This is where your site comes in. Don't make a web surfer click off your site to find information on a product—give them the information right on site. This means you should have articles available about any and all issues affecting a particular type of product or service. There can be hundreds of potential topics on one type of product, and a site may have dozens upon dozens of products available.

Not only will this type of information keep your site relevant to web surfers, it will be relevant to search engines as well. With content, these make up your target audience: search engine spiders and real people. If you provide relevant content that speaks to both, your site can compete with the giants.

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Web Site Optimization

All optimization is not equal. There is such a rush to optimize a website for search engines that people don't realize that some SEO techniques can be self-defeating. Either a lot of work will go into a particular type of optimization that is fruitless or it can be downright harmful for search engine ranking. A high search-engine ranking is the holy grail of search engine optimization, but make sure you put your energy in the right place.

The first two issues involve web design: don't use flash or frames when designing a website. These won't get you banned by search engines; but the site might be ignored entirely. While you can use some flash animation within a site, overuse of flash should be avoided. Search engines like text, not fancy graphics. A flash-heavy site could be passed over. The same goes for a site written with frames;frame-heavy sites confuse search engines so the sites are not properly indexed. The text on a framed site is hidden within the frame, so even if there is ample content within the frame, it will not be read correctly. Verdict: avoid it.

When writing content, make sure the content makes sense. In the early days of the web, people went keyword crazy. They would cram a huge paragraph of keywords throughout a page. This worked for a little while. Now search engines are wise to it and this technique can lead to a site being banned. Website owners try to trick search engines by including the keywords within actual content, but if the keywords are too close together, this could also lead to problems.

Another issue is spamdexing. Never use keywords that don't apply specifically to a site. This can most often be seen with site owners using adult-themed keywords to bring in unrelated searches. This will cause a site to be quickly red-flagged. Using invisible text is a bad idea as well. Invisible text is the same color as the background. It can be read by spiders, but can't be read by human eyes. The problem here is that spiders now recognize this technique and it will be red-flagged.

Generally, content should be useful and informative. You can include specific keywords within content, but if you provide enough content, these keywords will be covered automatically without jeopardizing the site with picky search engine spiders. The use of quality content is two-fold: it's a better way to optimize with search engines and web surfers will spend a longer time on the site reading articles or other content. The trick is to create trust; both with spiders and real people

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