This can be a convoluted topic where the unique characteristics of each search engine are considered to create highly appealing content. In most cases, however, the general concepts are all that you will need to know to attain a positive search engine placement, especially when you are focusing on less competitive goals.
For maximum effectiveness, content should be:
Unique
Content should be written uniquely for each page of your web site. Why? Well, when a search engine spider indexes each page, it constantly searches for any patterns that match known spam practices.
Fresh
Search engines are always on the lookout for web sites that offer information useful to their users. If Google found new content every time it indexed your web site, your site would instantly gain credibility because this would indicate that your site is constantly evolving. Following the logic of a search engine (and they are all essentially logical), an evolving web site is likely to be more interesting to searchers since the content is up-to-date. As a result your site has a better chance of obtaining better placements and maintaining the positions gained.
Relevant
Relevance can not be emphasized enough! It is important that when you create the copy for a web page you try to maintain the overall relevance of the topic.
Visible
Seems simple right? Well, there are many ways to unwittingly damage the visibility of a beautifully written web site. Many of the following elements are straight out of search engine placement 101 but they must be noted:
Do Not Use Frames: There are few worse blocks to search engine indexing than framesets. If your site is using frames and all of your content is found within a frameset then you may need to reconsider a redesign.
Do Not Create a Site Totally in Flash: Flash is a beautiful medium for advanced and often engaging multimedia BUT, it should not be the sole medium for your web site because the content within flash is not viewable by a search engine.
Note: Image ALT tags do the job somewhat by providing an ALTernative copy of the text shown in the image, however, this is a poor substitution for true visible text.
Provide Alternative Navigation Options: Most sites employ a graphical navigation method which provides a very attractive and often functional method of navigating a web site. By ALT tagging each of the menu buttons with a topical summary of the destination page, graphical menus can even be effective for search engines.
The reason behind the text menu becomes clearer when you understand that hyperlinked text is more credible than a linked graphic. This is because the text within the link can be read and, as with any properly designed navigation, the menu's text link defines the topic of the destined page. Also, since this text is visible to visitors (unlike less visible ALT tags) there is less likelihood that you are trying to fool the search engines. This adds further credibility to the overall topic of the destined page which, in combination with the correctly written content, creates an even better atmosphere for top placements.
The sitemap is useful because of a certain well-known characteristic of search engines; they often take a long time to index pages that are located deep within a web site. So by creating a sitemap (preferably with text links) that is accessible from any page, you provide the search engines with a direct route to every page within your site. Not only do you facilitate a faster crawl of your web site but you provide the search engines with more text links which may further increase the credibility of your content.
