The Changing Face of SEO: Content on Your Site… and How to Ensure it’s Working to Improve Your Rankings
Rewind a few years or so, and the most popular SEO strategy for many companies across the world began and ended with keywords. Indeed, back then, simply focusing on a well selected list of keywords and peppering them naturally through the website was often enough to get the desired results on Google. However, this singular focus, as the search engines soon appreciated, led inevitably to SEO experts manipulating content accordingly, and search results ran a significant risk of becoming irrelevant for the user.Web content marketing: The new SEO
These days, the process of climbing the ranks is far more sophisticated, with a significantly firmer focus on relevant content, and rightly so. After all, the search engines were originally created with one purpose in mind; to connect the searcher with the product, service or information that they were interested in. If this purpose is not being fulfilled, then the user begins to lose faith in the search engine, rendering the whole system virtually useless. The current system, largely encouraged by the recent release of Google’s Hummingbird, focuses on web content as a whole, rather than placing too much importance upon the keywords alone. As a result, it is fair to say that SEO as we all once knew it is dying a death, and clearing the way for a fresher, more exciting form of web content marketing – one where content is master, and relevance, genuine value and authenticity is vital.Web content marketing: New SEO practices to introduce to your site
Here are a few important things to think about when creating content for your site.- Keywords are still relevant, but specific (long-tail) is better. As the emphasis is very much upon creating content that is relevant to the user, your focus needs to be upon identifying keywords that correlate exactly to your products or services. If, for example, you are a furniture company, but only deliver to North London, and only offer hand-crafted items, then your keywords should reflect this, rather than trying to be too broad with your terms.
- Social media is crucial to success. No matter how hesitant you are to join the social media scene, there’s no denying that social media has become virtually integral to the success of your company. Not only does it help build brand awareness, but website referrals from popular social media sites are excellent ways of improving ranking.
- Improve your bounce-back rate. If your visitors enter your site, then immediately leave, this can be enormously detrimental to your search engine rankings. Your job is to create a site that is easy to navigate, that won’t frustrate your users (with issues such as long download times, awkwardly placed articles etc) and offers the user something of genuine value, to ensure they linger on the site for as long as possible.
- Fresh content. One of the most effective ways of introducing fresh content on to your site is blogging. It’s not uncommon to experience a 50% increase in organic search traffic when you invest the time and effort to providing a blog that offers something of real interest to the user.
