Keep it Fresh: Making Search Engines Happy with Fresh, Relevant Content

Search engine optimisation is a process of creating and improving your website so that it can be ranked higher in page results returned by search engines for particular keyword searches in your niche. Ranking high on search engines’ results pages can give you a constant stream of visitors to your site, which can be translated into potential customers if the site is business related. The techniques and methods for search engine optimisation vary all the time as search engines change their algorithms and criteria in how they rank websites. There is one thing that remains constant, though, and that is that search engines like to rank websites with fresh and relevant content higher than those that don’t include new, useful content for visitors.

Search Engine Spiders

Search engines have robotic spiders that constantly search through the entire internet structure looking for specific, exclusive and even rare content. If your site has new, relevant, unique, content the search engines will rank that favourably.

Recommended Platform – WordPress

Many local business owners we know have a static site that has been designed and looks great but just sits on the web providing, perhaps, useful information about the business but doesn’t provide the fresh, relevant content that the spiders crave. There are many reasons for this including small business owners not being aware that this is required, but the other big barrier to this is that many website designers don’t provide an easy, cheap (and for that read free!) way for business owners to add fresh content to their site. We recommend WordPress as a platform for a website that provides both static pages, like a more traditional ‘brochure’ website, but also provides an opportunity to add fresh content very easily onto your site as often as you want.

How much content do you need?

Fresh content on your site doesn’t have to be very long, or time consuming; as long as it gives the visitor and the search engine enough relevant information it will be fine. Blog posts can be as short as required but we would suggest about 250 words is a good length. Plan to include keywords that relate to your business that your potential customers may be searching for. This is important for the search engines, but don’t add keywords in at the expense of readability; your website should be written for your real visitors, i.e. people, not to mention that the search engines are getting better at determining when sites have ’stuffed’ keywords into their copy and they don’t like it. Try and include one or two links to another useful website, which can help to show your visitors that you are helpful, and may get the other website owners coming back to visit you and maybe put a link to your website on theirs.

A Practical Example

If you are a builder, you could add a blog website giving home improvement tips that provide good content about DIY. You can use this to build a following of people that know, like and trust you and are more likely to buy from you when they’re ready and it will also provide you with an opportunity to use the relevant keywords that might get you found in the search engines when people are looking for a builder in your local area (you need to ensure that you add local content that gives you a chance to include local geographic keywords too if you want to be found in local searches).

Fresh, unique content

Don’t find content that’s already online, vaguely rewrite it and then publish it on your site as unique content. The web spiders are much more efficient than humans at finding content and comparing it to other content and will soon find out that you aren’t posting fresh content, which will defeat the object of doing it as it will probably affect your search engine rankings. Use your expertise to write your content; create content in your niche like ‘how to’ articles and ‘top 10 tips’, people like lists and bullet points – they’re easier to read; keep people up to speed with developments in your industry; link to interesting content that you find elsewhere on the web and provide your own take on it, adding to the content not regurgitating it.

Frequency of Blog Posts

I’ve been going on about fresh content, but another point to make is about how often you update your website. The more frequent your postings are the more attractive they are for the search engine spiders. We see a spike each time we post on this site, and cumulatively this is also driving an increase in traffic. I’ll scare you now – daily posting would be great, but almost impossible for most small business owners that I know! Try and post at least a couple of times a week, but even once a week is better than nothing. And did you know that in WordPress you can write posts and then schedule them to go live at a later date, so if you want to post three times a week you can do them all at the same time and then just time them to go live spaced out over the week.

What other tips do you have for keeping your website fresh with new content? Do let us know in the comments.

Photo Credit: jenny downing