Optimizing Website Content for Search Engines

Newfangled promotes a strategy in which we don't ultimately have to choose between writing for people or for search engines. While this tension will always exist for the main website, a customized section of a site can be built where content can be re-purposed and written with the opposite emphasis - search engines first, people second.

Before I describe it let me disassociate our approach from a similar, inappropriate technique and reiterate a few key principles. Our approach is similar to, but not the same as a practice referred to as "doorway pages." Doorway pages are hidden pages added to a site that are seeded with strategic (and often irrelevant) key words and phrases and point people into the actual site. This technique was abused and is considered spamming to search engines.

The approach we are advocating does not hide search engine specific pages. You can get to a search engine index area by clicking a visible link at the bottom of a site page. Again, the key principle is relevance. Doorway pages were hidden because they were generally irrelevant to the main site. The pages we are creating are simply reiterating a site's actual, relevant content, but in a way that actually helps search engines and search engine users, by titling the content using terms that are more considerate of how people actually search for information.

Let's go back to the previous example about our newsletter on website splash pages called, "Splash is Dead." As I mentioned before, this title is not going to help a search engine user find this article, even though it is highly relevant to the topic of splash pages. Such an article can be set up as a "Search Engine Index" page. In this context it would be given a search engine friendly titled like "website splash pages" both on the page and in the browser title tag - just the way Google likes it.

For every newsletter I write I break it up into smaller linked pages and give each page a targeted, specific keyword. When doing searches with these title phrases, the pages tend to come up quite high in Google. The more pages we post, the more incremental visits we are generating to our site. This approach is actually opposite of search engine spamming. Search engine spamming is the attempt to get people to unrelated or barely related pages by using irrelevant phrases. Our approach starts with absolutely relevant information, but surrounds it with the kind of appropriate information search engines need to properly index and rank the information based on what it truly about. Because this approach respects the search engines effort to return relevant information, and respects the users effort in trying to locate relevant information, there is a high degree of certainty that as search engines change, the performance of these pages will be protected and even improved.


It does take an investment of time to create and break up site content into the search engine sensitive pages. However, with the NewfangledCMS, the time is minimized to the necessary "thinking part" of this effort. Creating the pages themselves, in the search engine area, is a simple matter of using the CMS to copy an existing article and paste in the new content. The harder part is thinking through what the best search term would be for the content. We'll pick up this subject in the next newsletter, and we'll preview some really exciting new search engine optimization and reporting tools.

However, if you offer PR services to your clients, this effort is fairly minimal as you will have the ability to make good guesses, since you should already be familiar with the industry terms and trends of your client's information. This approach simply multiplies the results of your current efforts in writing news, press, and marketing materials. As an added benefit (one we'll underscore next month), placing your content into these search engine sensitive pages can concretely demonstrate the value of the content you create for your client.