Google's stated mission is to index all human knowledge. A modest objective! So on the one hand they will seek to make money through paid-for advertising (Adwords) but on the other hand they will get audiences for those advertisers by aiming to be the best search engine in the world, and presenting those adverts to relevant searchers. Two completely separate but related objectives, and the reason for our sixth search engine optimisation tip:

6. Great Content

The aim for all search engines is to present the most relevant documents for the search phrase entered. Relevance is of course measured by several things as we’ve already discussed, but the words on the page are perhaps the most important. Not only the quantity of content, but the quality, as measured by keyword density. That’s another topic in itself but clearly if you have a hundred pages informing and educating the visitor about widgets, you will be deemed to have a far more important and useful site than someone who is merely selling widgets.

Don’t worry though, the site doesn’t have to be given over to education.  As long as the articles are available somewhere behind the main ‘selling’ pages then that's fine, and good search engine optimisation will ensure that the search engines can find all your lovely content when they analyse your site.

And if you’re worried about how to collate so much information there are ways to do that very speedily too.

Content is still king, and the search engines are focusing more and more on informative sites. Cynics would say the reason for this is to force commercial interests to use paid-for advertising. But that isn’t necessary. It is also interesting that, because of their background, the founders of Google favoured academic sites. But again it is argued that there is no bias there, it’s just that those sites have real content.

To check how much content you have type the following into the google search box “site:www.yoursite.com”.

An interpretation of this is as follows

1 – 10 pages              Low content
10 – 100 pages          Average content 
100 – 1000 pages       High content 
1000 – 10000 pages   Very high content

Of course you mustn’t forget that 10,000 pages of irrelevant and badly organised content is not going to help! Only good quality, targeted and well-placed content will help you to reach the top of the pile, and that's why we, as search engine optimisation experts, pay a lot of attention to the content of your site.

So in the armoury of the search engine optimisation specialist content is an important weapon. Some would say the most important weapon.