Content is king in the world of search engine optimization. The bottom line is that if your website doesn’t contain great content, users won’t spend very long on your website; and the longer website visitors interact on a webpage, the more likely it is to rank high in searches. One can optimize a website using hundreds of different techniques, but only so much can be done if it lacks solid content. Information is the heart and soul of every website, and the following guidelines will help you take your website content from standard to stupendous.
- It Better Be Useful. You can have a thousand pages of content on your website, but if nobody finds value in the information it may as well be wasted space. Focus on providing useful or helpful information that your audience will engage with. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself what would spark an interest to read more…and more.
- Fresh is Best. Nobody cares about news articles from five years ago and neither do search engines. When users search online, they want the most up-to-date content available. Be sure to keep your website updated with fresh information that isn’t dated more than a few years.
- Keep It Unique. Possibly the most important factor of all three, unique content will separate you from the pack of competitors. Google has a strict “no-plagiarizing” policy that will actually penalize websites with duplicated content by dropping them down in organic rankings. In order to avoid search engine penalties, be sure that the words on your website are your own, not copied from a competitor or an article in the New York Times.
This article was written by one of our Beyond Banking for Small Business presenters, Hans Broman, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Bank Midwest. Hans handles sales, marketing and search engine optimization at iPoint, a web and IT services company.