Great content increases visitor numbers and conversion rates

Page content is arguably the most important aspect of any website. Good quality, unique content that provides the information that the user is after lowers bounce rates and helps to encourage sales and sales leads, therefore improving conversion rates. It is also an effective way of gaining back links as it encourages other websites to link to your site. This s known as link bait.

Why good quality page content is necessary

The better your content is, the more likely people will want to read it. In terms of search engine optimisation, the best content is new, up to date, unique content. The content has to be easy to read, portraying the key content quickly and concisely providing the user with the information they are looking for and selling the product or service offered. Users tend to be impatient; unless they are provided with the information they are looking for immediately, they are likely to ‘bounce’ and potentially go to a competitor’s site. It is paramount that once you have got a potential customer to your website, you keep them there with quality content so that they convert into a sale.

The content should target specific keywords

Relevance is very important and therefore it is vital to have quality content that is specific to the keywords that you are going to target. This will help to ensure low bounce rates and great conversion rates. Search engines are very hot on spam these days too so having relevant pages is essential.

Quality Content Increases inbound links

Your content is in effect link bait. If your site has good quality content, other sites are more likely to link to your site and thus increasing the number of inbound links to your site. Search engines see inbound links as votes; the more links you have the better your site is likely to be and therefore you will rank higher in the search engines. Any technique to encourage links should be utilised if you intend on being at the top of the major search engines.

The balance between text and images in website content

The balance between text and images is dependent upon the site in question. E-commerce and flash sites tend to have image dominant content opposed to static sites. These sites look great and offer a great user experience however they are not search engine friendly. They are now becoming search engine friendly with Google now indexing flash sites and image rich sites through alternate text tags, though they are still much harder to gain high rankings compared to static html sites.

There are many SEO methods to improve the ranking of image rich sites though where possible content should be encouraged as search engine crawlers can only read text.