It seems to me that the best way to deal with these stupid algorithm changes is to build a nice website, get people to link with you (although that seems less important these day) and have tons and tons of content.

A top ranking website in my area has tons of useless content but I guess the search engines view him as an authority site for Sarasota. Since the google update I am building pages about the areas I work in.

How many pages do you have and how are your rankings?
Who is really building pages on a daily or weekly basis?
Any opinions on the importance of content?

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Marc Rasmussen
Michael Saunders and Company

Sarasota Real Estate

Good to see others looking at more than just links to rank well. There is no doubt that links are important but content and other factors are important too. A couple of content related factors that I believe are important are proper semantic markup for your content and intra-site linking to focus on and highlight content pages.

Can you elaborate on this?

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Marc Rasmussen
Michael Saunders and Company

Sarasota Real Estate

I can give you the general concept. I won't go into much detail because that is what I provide for clients.

Most SEOs will tell you about how important content is. Then they stop as if they and everyone else who writes content for a web page know exactly what they are doing. But do they know? Search engines do not have the advantages of human readers who have visual clues when they read a web page.

When writing for the web there are two important considerations.

One is semantic well formedness. A brief definition is that "the content will make sense in the language that it is written in." There are rules for semantic well formedness. An example of how a search engine could use the rules is to set the conditions to discard pages filled with key words but make little sense, in other words when the content is not 'natural'. (I know there are other ways of doing it.) Taking it a step further. The second content consideration is correct semantic markup. Markup is html tags. Each tag can provide and enhance the meaning of text that is between the tags. For example, an H1 tag is a general heading similar to a title of a chapter. When SEOs learned H1 tags were valued by the search engines they began to fill their pages with h1 tags around keywords. It didn't work because this technique breaks semantic well formedness and correct semantic markup.

I hear the nay sayers. Do I know for a fact that search engines are semantically attuned? No. But why wouldn't search engines use something so convenient that helps them find meaning and at the same time discard spam. A more important reason is that users find semantically attuned pages much more accessible and usable.

Several years ago I wrote a couple of pages on how to write for the web for non-profit sites. While they are still geared for non-profits the concepts are applicable. I now have them here: http://cssdesignmagic.com/web-content.html and here: http://cssdesignmagic.com/writing-for-the-web.html You can learn more about the semantic markup from http://w3c.org.