Write for Users

If your site does not offer information for which the user is looking, the user will leave your site and quickly. In other words, it's not just enough to get the user to view your page. You have to build the page so that the user will want to stay there. You want users to keep coming back to your site and recommend it to other users.

The main goal of a search engine is to deliver pages to the user that are most relevant to the search criteria. Pages with greater relevance and usefulness are ranked higher than other pages. The search engine analyzes the content, looking for keywords that match the search criteria. The search engine also makes a determination about the usefulness of each page it indexes. One of the ways the engine determines usefulness is to look at all the other pages, internal and external, that link to that page.

While there are some ways to get a bunch of links to your site quickly, the search engines know these tricks and the tricks can end up demoting your site in rankings. You should avoid link exchanges and other linking tricks.

The best way to get other sites to link to your site is to create pages worth linking to. If you're creating a site all about jellyfish, you want to try to create an authoritative and useful site, so when a CNN researcher finds it using Google, he or she will link to it from a CNN front-page story. Because CNN is such a popular site, the search ranking for your site will improve.

Good Writing

How do you write useful content for users? If you've ever had to write an essay for school, you already know the answers:

• Know your audience.
• Stay focused on the subject.
• Use one topic per paragraph.
• Get to the point.
• Avoid unnecessary words.
• Keep sentences short.
• Prefer the simple to the complex.
• Prefer the familiar word.
• Put action in your verbs.
• Write like you speak.
• Order ideas logically.
• Use headings to break up long sections.