What is content? The text portion of your site is the content. Without content, the search engines will have no idea how to rank your site.

Plus, without plenty of great content, your human visitors may question the worthiness of your site. The trick is to create plenty of great content for which the search engines will rank the page well AND human visitors will find useful. Content is far more important than the site's design actually. A cheesy looking site could generate much more traffic than a fancy site designed with flash, etc.

The more pages of content the site has the better. In order to rank in Google and Yahoo well, it is important that the site has many pages of content of a general theme. The search engines may find a site very questionable if some page are about gardening and other pages are about satellite TV!

By the way, I just had someone ask recently about one-page sites…Like my site: www. RealWebSitePro.com. This person pointed out that there are many successful sales pages on the web like this which are the only one page on the entire domain. This is true. However, what is also true is that they are either an off-shoot of a larger, content filled site or are simply a landing page used for AdWords for example. RealWebSitePro.com is a little of both.

Besides being relevant to the theme of the site, the content must be completely original. I mean you must write it or pay someone to write it. If you copy the content from places like free article directories, the search engines will not rank the page well. It must be completely original. If you pay someone to write it for you, always check their work by running an HTML page of it through CopyScape.com.

How much content per page? Most SEO experts agree that at least 300 to 400 words should be the minimum. Most shoot for 700 to 1000 words per page. Each page should be optimized for just one keyword usually. Sometimes you can get a two-for-one with keywords like “dog collar” and “leather dog collar”.

How many times should a keyword show up in the content? If used too often, search engines will consider the page spam and penalize it. If used to few times, they won’t realize the article should be ranked well for that keyword. For single or double word keywords like “dog collar”, it’s probably best to keep the keyword density between 3 and 5%...I usually shoot for around 3 or 4%, but don’t fret about it too much. For long-tail keywords like “large leather dog collars”, the keyword should be inserted quite a bit less. The reason for this is that the longer the keyword, the more awkward its over-usage will seem for human readers. Also, the search engines may realize it is not natural to have a long-tail keyword inserted very often. Never underestimate the search engines.

Lastly (for this short article anyway), it is important to link all of your pages together. I am not talking about just the navigation system which may appear on each page. It is also important to have links within the content to other pages within the site. For example, if a page about fruit allergies in babies happens to have a line it with the words “milk allergy in babies”, link those words to a page on your site about milk allergies…if there is one.

Yes, content really is king no matter what your Internet business sells or promotes. Without it a site is all but dead in the water with respect to search engine rankings. Creating plenty of content is very important and is why one should choose a familiar area. Having to research each and every keyword in order to create the content for it will get old very fast!