Why Content is More Important than Code

SEO is such a controversial topic. Someone is always willing to make it more complicated than it has to be, and since there are a lot of unknowns, and untrackable factors with SEO, there are plenty of people willing to misinterpret evidence, and send you off on a wild goose chase, and waste your time that could be better spent doing something important.

When you get into tweaking code, you usually start with title tags, meta tags, and alt tags (in that order). But putting those items first on your list for SEO tasks would be foolish, because they are not the first thing you should concern yourself with.

Content is, and always will be, the first consideration with SEO. The purpose of code is twofold:

• To make it easier for search engines to know what your content is about.  
• To make it easier for the search engines to actually get at the content.  

So people put in metatags and title tags to tell the search engines what their content is - but the search engines WON'T pay attention to the tags unless the content echoes what the tags say.

You simplify page coding and elements to make it easier for search engines to spider the content. But that won't do any good unless you first have good content.

And the rule about good content is simple:

Write for people first.

If you write for people, the search engines pick it up, people link to you, and the search engines respond to THAT. If you write for search engines, people don't like it!

Good writing for people includes:

1. Good spelling and grammer. It just so happens that search engines can understand those better too.

2. Getting to the point right away, and not wasting people's time. This helps with SEO also.

3. Using familiar words so people know what it is about, and so they can easily find it. That is also perfect for SEO.

4. Writing in a natural manner. Sometimes that includes lots of keywords, sometimes just a few. That is normal. Search engines are getting better at distinguishing normal from abnormal.

Get good content into place first. A site with good content and no intentional SEO will outperform a site with bad content and intensive SEO, hands down, and good content means more for SEO than any amount of picky coding. Coding helps, but it is finish work, not the whole job.

Written by Laura Wheeler
Owner, Firelight Web Studio
http://www.firelightwebstudio.com 
Ask us about getting the website you need to help your business succeed, at a price you can afford!