Have you ever heard the phrase “Content is King!”? This is an apt description, but lacks any real clarity or depth for SEO purposes. What if we added to it a bit? “Well written and formatted optimized keyword interlaced content is king!” Not quite as catchy or memorable but it better fits the bill for our purposes. Content really goes deeper to include video, music , images, documents, pdfs, programs and on and on. It is the sum of all the visual and audible elements of the page even the fonts and color schemes.

Your content will have to do double duty and play to two audiences. First, search engine spiders and indexing algorithms (The Machines) and second the customer or consumer of your web page (The Humans). Each category has its own requirements.

Spiders crawl text and feed search engines, the search engines index text based of key indexes. These key indexes are built off guess what! Keywords! Text is their bread and butter. This is where pages built heavily in text excel, where image laden and Flash only sites wither. The technology required to decompose visual images and audible sounds into text components does not exist widespread. You may have your entire product catalog, images, descriptions, prices and more in your bleeding-edge-state-of-the-art Flash presentation, but none of the search engines will be able to index any of that content worth a damn! Even by using ALT tags and other SEO tricks for non text content. Real Visible Text trumps any hidden text!

On the flip side, Humans grow bored with text only pages for the most part. Images and other eye candy can draw a visitor deeper into your site. Studies have shown browsers regularly skim headings and titles to get the feel of whether they are at the right site. Sometimes a color or a typo throws them off and they leave.

Throw a paragraph of keyword-optimized text written to appeal to a spider at a human and see how quickly they leave. Or direct a spider to a Flash only home landing page and watch how fast they leave! Therefore, the trick is in balancing the needs of the two. We at UCANSEO work with talented designers all the time. This is their forte, making things sensory appealing to humans. We make pages appealing to spiders! Below we offer a number of suggestions that we recommend you use either when doing your own web coding or hiring it out.