SEO Blog

I won’t need to tell you how important content is to search engine rankings. As one of the two major factors, alongside links, content gives your site focus and it also provides vital contextualisation.

Whilst having content on every page of a site is ideal, it can become tired and worn over time. This is noticed not only by frequent visitors but by the search engines too. If there is nothing new on a site to index, the search engine spiders won’t visit. If you don’t get the search engine spiders crawling your pages, then what hope for improved rankings?

Of course you don’t want to be chopping and changing your content constantly. This would be impractical and wouldn’t necessarily have the desired result. But the occasional spruce up can always pay dividends.

This will be particularly true for any pages you are struggling to get a ranking for. If link building and other SEO methods aren’t achieving the results you were hoping for, then it might be time to readdress the body copy.

Check the headline first, make sure this is relevant to the page and, if possible, includes the main key phrase within it. Try to also ensure that there is only one H1 tag. Whilst some still maintain that H1′s have very little impact in optimisation, it will certainly do no harm to give it a little push in the right direction.

Next up is the main copy itself. Identify what the problem might be.

Is it long enough?

A good page should have upwards of 200 words on it. If you are falling well below this, you might not be giving your visitors or the search engines enough information. So don’t be afraid to develop it further or, better still, start from scratch and pay attention to the details.

Does it contain the correct keywords?

Okay, so keywords aren’t the be all and end all, but you need to at least include some. This will again help to anchor the page for the terms you are looking to rank for. Don’t go overboard remember, just get one near the beginning and include naturally (along with synonyms) elsewhere.

Is it readable?

It doesn’t take much to put a visitor off, so when you come to check your content, question whether or not you would be happy to sit down and read through it all. If it is poorly formatted, far too long or doesn’t include obvious signposts (including sub-headings and bullets) then you might well have hit the nail on the head.

Fresh content needn’t be constrained to existing pages. If you want to get the search engine crawlers indexing your site, you might want to find a way to include regular updates.

Ordinarily a news page or blog is the perfect solution to this issue. If you can write new articles, post them on your site and occasionally link to some of your money pages, you will also increase three things:

1. The number of unique (rankable) pages you have
2. Traffic streams coming in
3. Gain links and strength for your site

This will all be hugely positive for your site and can really give your SEO work a shot in the arm.

So when you are looking to improve your search engine rankings, don’t forget the value of good, fresh content.