Tag Archives: Website Content

Does your website’s content affect your SEO?

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Note: someone asked this question on Quora but when I tried to post it there, it generated an error. After that, I couldn’t find the question. Since I have already prepared an answer, I’m publishing it here.

To genuinely understand the answer to this question, you first need to understand what Google indexes and ranks? It’s content.

Now, since there may be thousands of web pages, blog posts and social media updates offerings similar type of content, Google uses an algorithm to decide which content it has indexed to rank higher than the other content it has indexed.

Now, Google cannot solely depend on its algorithm because software can always be tricked into believing something that does not exist. That’s why, people were always “hacking” their way into higher search engine rankings. Google also analyzes how people interact with and react to your content. This is called human validation. If humans don’t appreciate your content well or don’t react to it positively, you can forget about getting higher search engine rankings.

So yes, a website’s content definitely affects SEO because one, after analyzing your content, the Google algorithm should be able to make out what the content is about and for which keywords and key phrases it should be ranked in what manner, and two, it should be able to gauge how people are reacting to your content.

What does interacting and reacting mean here? Right now your content (a particular web page or a particular blog post) may be ranking on the fifth page and by some fluke, search engine users reach the fifth place and click your link. If your bounce rate is low – that is, people go to your link and spend some time reading it because it contains useful information – Google takes it as a positive attribute. It thinks that since people are spending more time on the link, the link must be useful and hence, it deserves higher search engine rankings. Your ranking improves a few notches. Conversely, after clicking the link when people immediately come back to Google and explore other links, your rankings go down.

Therefore, to improve your SEO with your website’s content, make sure that the Google crawler can rank your content easily, the algorithm can make sense of your content, and your content is appreciated by your visitors. All these attributes affect your SEO.

Wondering what type of content you should publish on your website?

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There is no dearth of content publishing ideas once you decide to use content marketing to promote your business, whether you want to publish content on your own website/blog or on third-party websites to gain more exposure (and high-quality incoming links).

As I have repeatedly mentioned on this blog, anything that manifests on the Internet can be termed as content. It’s another issue whether it is solving some purpose or not. An image, a link, a blog post, an articles, a social media update, a mindmap representation, your menubar, a video, a screen cast, a product description page, an FAQs page, everything that comes in front of you is content. So whenever you’re publishing something, you’re publishing content.

Many businesses desiring to use content marketing to promote themselves think that content marketing merely means publishing blog posts and articles and then submitting them to various directories (old world) and social networking websites (new world). Publishing blog posts and articles and submitting them everywhere is certainly one of the main parts of content marketing, it isn’t just blog posts and articles that make up your content. This Entrepreneur blog post lists 101 different types of web content that you can use to build your website.

Why your small business needs a website and why your website needs good content

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Your small business needs a website because people are ditching their phone directories and local print publications in favor of online sources? The reality is, quickly opening a browser and conducting a search is so much easier than finding a directory and flipping through it’s voluminous pages. Almost all major search engines are pushing their local search features and if you are a small business serving your local market, then you are missing big time, as this article rightly puts, by not having a website for your business.

The advantages of a website are:

  • It is always there, 24×7 and if you have enabled ecommerce features then people can shop on your website round-the-clock.
  • All of a sudden you expand your market.
  • There is no limit to what you want to say; you have all the space in the world.
  • You can update your website whenever you feel like.
  • You don’t have to maintain a physical inventory.
  • …this list goes on and on.

The importance of website content

One of the greatest strengths of your website is of course, your content: what you say to your visitors. When it comes to your website, communication is of supreme importance. There are two primary reasons why most websites fail to generate business — they don’t have a well-defined business strategy and they don’t have good content.

Being a content writer/provider and an online copywriter this is the first thing I notice when I visit a new website — how well the inherent message is conveyed. You may decide to disagree, but your content can really make or break your business, because it’s the only way of communicating with your visitors. Although I may sound like saying this from writing point of view, content basically means anything you publish on your website: text, images, videos and audios. The written text may act as a primary communication tool, or a secondary communication tool. Many graphic designers and web designers for instance simply post visuals and don’t care much about textual information and it works for those who have already created a brand presence using their own contacts or social networking tools. But if you want to draw traffic from search engines then you must give serious thought to some well-crafted, targeted content.