The Importance of Content

With the growing use of Flash Design and fancy imagery for web pages, content has become brief or non-existent. Many times, important content is placed within the Flash documents or images to give the page viewer a dynamic statement of the sites purpose. Often, these statements contain important keywords that are relative to the site and great for optimization. The sites viewers learn the sites purpose from these important statements but do the search engines?

A search engine uses a search tool called a "spider" or "bot" to read web pages. These spiders do not view, they read, unlike a typically viewer, a search engine spider only reads the code which viewers "view" the result of. Search engine spiders quickly read through the code to gather information about the site and its material. If you have ever read html code you will have noticed that a majority of the code is code building the site structure, then the text and the text. Images and Flash may have a large impact to the design but typically are represented by a small piece of code. This is because image and Flash files encompass all their material within the file and not the code. This also means that a spider will only see a single file and none of the material that is in it. To provide some incite to the content within an image file you can add an additional piece of code called an ALT tag which gives a label to the image which is not seen when viewing the site. These tags are very important and should be used whenever possible but they hold very little weight when compared to real text.

The best way to create rich content for optimizing a site is to use keywords frequently and to label your most important keywords with styles. Just as a well done Flash document impresses the viewer, text that is labeled with important tags such as; bold, Header 1, and Header 2 are given more weight by spiders. Text that is a within a hyper-link is also given greater weight as it is thought to be more important. When writing material for a site it is important to use specific keywords wherever possible. Frequently used words and phrases are noticed and generally a well optimized site will repeat its keywords and keyword phrases at 4% ratio to other words.