Website Content

If you were to take an honest good look at the content on your website, how would you rate it? Is the content up to date, inspired, fresh and relevant? Unique content is one of many keys to search engine success. Content, along with link popularity and social media, plays a crucial role in your search engine ranking.

When considering revising the content of your website, it's important to take into account the needs of your customers as well as search engine optimisation. Your content should be keyword rich, but use keywords and phrases wisely and relevantly. You can have keyword rich content that might boost your Google likeability, but if it makes no sense to potential customers, it's useless.

Base your content on the requirements of the customer, put them first. Make sure that your website content is well planned and structured. Using headings will encourage this and H1 tags are good for SEO. Make your headings catchy and intriguing. Let the customer know they're looking in the right place but force them to read more by not giving away too much. The longer someone stays on your website, the more likely you are to get your message across or sell your product.

When producing content for your website, think about what appeals to you when you visit other websites. If the content is unclear and confusing, it will probably annoy you. If it annoys you, you can be fairly certain that it will annoy other people. When people become irritated with a website, their easiest chance of escape is navigating away from the site.

Make sure your spelling and grammar are great. If you're trying to promote yourself as a professional business or individual, it reflects badly if your website is littered with spelling mistakes. If you're not confident in creating your own unique content for the site, I would recommend that you consider employing someone to do it. Copywriters are trained professionals and will know exactly what to write and where to write it on your site. Although it may be another added expense to the development of your website, it should be money well spent. Another  point to remember is that your website designer is unlikely to be a copywriter so don't expect that content will be included as part and parcel of the website design and build.

Just a short post this one, but hopefully it's proved to be helpful.

The SEO addiction

The problem with Search Engine Optimisation for Joe Bloggs is that it seems to be an unquantifiable phenomenon. There doesn't seem to be any right or wrong answers. I don't know how many times I've typed searches into Google to increase my page rank, moz rank, backlinks and hubspot score. I seem to gain a little each time, but I've not had any overwhelming results yet. It's a tedious, laborious exercise that shows very few tangible results.

I must admit, I'm despairing somewhat about the battle of the rankings in an effort to increase work. We have a steady stream of work which is great, but we also have visions of taking the business to the next level and going global (don't we all!).

One of the worst aspects about SEO research and work is the amount of spammy mail you end up getting in your inbox. I opened my mailbox this morning to find 37 messages from companies and individuals promising to get me to the number one spot on Google and other search engines, all for a price of course. I guess I could pay someone to do all the hard work, but I've learned so much that I now have this overwhelming urge to keep plugging at it in the hope that we'll get results.

The site currently ranks in the top 12.9% of all websites according to Alexa, so I suppose this is a result in itself. When we first started out, I think we were way down at 46% so improvement indeed.

It's important to remember as well that our main as Polaris Design is to create quality websites for our customers - which we continue to do, but this SEO bug seems to have taken hold and turned into an addiction. I'll probably spend the next 3 hours now scouring the internet in the hope of finding the answer to the elusive question - "how do I get to number 1 on Google?".