Beyond Design. Thinking Content for SEO.
When creating a new website for a client a lot of effort goes into creating the visual look. Elements such as colour choice, photography and illustration, intuitive navigation and your company’s brand all play important roles in shaping your customers’ perception of your company. When it comes to your website’s search engine performance, however, none of these things really matter. To the search engines’ computers content is king.
One of the benefits of having an internet presence is that it allows you to open up a potentially global market for a relatively small investment. Ensuring that the search engines can find your site and index it correctly is a process called “Search engine Optimization” (SEO).
The goal of SEO is to make your website appear as close to the top as possible in search results.
Although there are techniques that we utilize when we create your website, SEO is an important topic to keep in mind as you are creating the content for your website because how you write the content will affect how well your website performs in web searches. Here are three important considerations to keep in mind when creating the content of your site:
Keywords - What are people looking for?
Search engines use programs called “Crawlers” or “Spiders” that automatically work their way through every page on the Internet reading the content and ranking it based on the keywords that they find. As you write your content, it’s important to ensure that the keywords people will use to perform their searches actually appear in the content of your webpages.
Taking the time to think like your customer and compiling a list of relevant keywords they might use to look for your website is time well spent.
Links - It’s who you know.
Some search engines place a high importance on who is linking to your website, and who you link to. They rank websites by giving them a “Page Rank” score which is essentially a measure of how trustworthy and relevant they believe your website is. If sites with a high “Page Rank” link to you (eg. “.gov”, or “.edu’) then you inherit their trustworthiness and will appear higher in search engine results.
Essentially, if your website is seen to be authoritative on a subject because other trusted sites link to yours for reference, you will perform better on the search engines.
Keep it fresh - update your homepage.
Current websites are favoured in search engines over sites that have “gone stale”. By placing a News Section or a Blog on your homepage you can help your website appear fresh to search engines encouraging them to “crawl” it more often to ensure your most recent changes are indexed.
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