Search Engine ABCs – Always Build Content
The ABCs of SEO
Another way to say it is “Always Bang-Out Content”. These simple ABCs of search engine marketing are really the only focus you need to worry about after your website is properly set up.
Assuming you already optimized your website for search engine “friendliness”, this is indeed the main focus from here on out. Search engines like to visit sites that update their content regularly. You want to be “talking” to the search engines often right? From a search marketing perspective this is an obvious “yes”. You want searchers to find the most up date news about your site and not old indexed information that may be misleading.
Another reason why you want to be always adding content to your site is because of something called the “longtail”. In search marketing the longtail is all the small bits of traffic you get from visitors typing in random search strings into search engines. The more content you have on your site, the more longtail traffic you will get. This is the key to success for old, massive sites.
So keep adding new content. Keep writing. If you can afford it, pay for people to write content for your site. It will pay off in the end. If your site does not seem like it has a place for regular content (due to it’s design), consider having a WordPress blog installed in a sub directory of your site. All businesses have a place for a business blog!
Another thing to consider is that having lots of pages of information is good, but having a lot of content on each page is another thing to think about.
a lot of content on each page is bad, cause most users don’t like to scroll down, and more than 50% of the surfers surf from laptops, so screen space should be used wisely.
This is a very good point. A lot of content will get you a lot of traffic, but you also must consider your conversion goals. With that in mind you may want to keep your calls to action clear and above the “fold”. You might also want to consider a conversion optimization service like Google Site Optimizer or Sitetuners. These services will test different elements on your page, like buy now buttons and advertisements. They will test all the possible combinations of where these elements should go on your webpage and determine which layout will generate the most number of conversions for you.
Automatic optimization is good when your on a very low budget site, but I prefer hiring a designer and a seo specialist, it’s a one time investment, that will pay off in the long run. They shouldn’t be too expensive, mediocre one would be enough too.
Well this brings up another interesting point. Most optimization services take the state of your initial website and try to improve upon it. That doesn’t mean that it will be the best converting site of all time. It may take a highly skilled professional designer to redo your site completely, and then apply the optimization services to see if you can achieve an even higher level of conversion.
My tip to those starting new sites: avoid the “Chinese Menu”. If your site is too cluttered, your visitors will not make a choice and will just leave your site immediately. Focus on what you do best and keep the options to a minimum.
The more content you have on your site, the more longtail traffic you will get. This is the key to success for old, massive sites.
The thruth is that there exist more than 200 factors that Mr. G considers when arranging your page in the serps. My top three are:
1/ code of the page – must be valid and error free ( also light enough)
2/ Clean user interface (comment number #5 admin)
3/adequate backlink structure ( not the quantity but the quality of the backlinks!
Can you elaborate on what you mean by “error free”?
The paradox with SEO is that google loves text, but users don’t. The key to driving people to your website is good SEO, but getting higher conversion rates and getting repeat visitors depends upon the user experience. Too many sites go one way or the other, but the trick is to continually tweak the site upon analyzing these statistics.
Also, it makes sense to do some A/B testing with different pages within your site (same page formatted differently), as that should help determine what people prefer – not what you THINK they prefer.
Depending on the site’s goals, I completely agree with balancing SEO vs testing. If you run a commerce site, revenue is the most important goal and the site should be continually tested and improved to maximize revenues. That may require cutting down some text to increase conversions (but at the same time it will slowly eat away at your traffic :). So it’s an iterative process.
Another thing to consider is that having lots of pages of information is good, but having a lot of content on each page is another thing to think about
I do agree that content is important but there are also many sites that rank very high in the serps and have not written new content in a long time. I own a couple of those kind of sites. In these cases I generally continue to drive traffic and create backlinks to keep them high in the rankings.
I do however, when creating a new site, create a lot of content for the first 3-4 months. After that I don’t do to much more with it as it has been indexed and I, again, continue to drive traffic to those newer sites.
This has worked for me on information sites.
For Clients I create content, drive traffic, and build links.
Rick
Add content. Add content, add content, and add content. Before you even register your domain, you should have enough ideas to build 100 pages on your site.