Chapter 9
Bulking Up Your Site —
Competing with Content
In This Chapter
Creating content yourself
Understanding copyright
Finding free material
Paying for content
C
ontent is often a very important factor in getting a high ranking in the
search engines. (Not convinced. Check out Chapter 4, where I present
my definitive argument for the primacy of content.) What do I mean by con-
tent. Content, in the broadest sense, is a geeky Web term that means “stuff on
your Web site." A content-rich Web site is one that contains lots and lots of
information for people to see, read, and use.
For search engines, content has a more narrow definition: words, and lots of
’em. So if you’re interested in search engine optimization, you should concen-
trate on the text part of your Web site’s content (the right text, of course,
using the keywords you find out about in Chapter 5). You don’t need to care
about pictures, video, or sound — at least as far as the search engines are
concerned — because those forms of content don’t help you get higher rank-
ings. You don’t need Flash animations, either, because although some search
engines are starting to index them, most do not. Moreover, Flash animations
generally don’t contain much indexable text, and rarely index well.
What you should be concerned about is text — words that the search engines
can read. Now, it’s not always necessary to bulk up your site by adding tex-
tual content — in some cases, it’s possible to get high search engine rankings
with a small number of keyword-laden pages. If that’s your situation, congrat-
ulations. Sit back and enjoy the fruits of your rather minimal labors, and skip
this chapter. But if you don’t find yourself in this happy situation, this chap-
ter helps you get there.
