If you could do one thing to enhance the quality of your business website and improve your search engine rankings, what would it be?
Well, there are a number of things you might do to improve performance, but there can be no question that the best solution of all would be to improve the quality of the content that you post on your website. It only takes a quick trawl round the internet to realise that the best-performing websites are generally the ones with highest-quality content. So, why is it so important now? Well, quality content has always been important, but since the introduction of the Panda update it has taken on crucial significance.
The quality of the content on offer now determines how successful a website will be.
Google now actively searches for websites with unique, fresh, relevant and interesting content, and promotes these on its search engine. If your business can’t provide this, then your search engine rankings will more than likely suffer. So, how do you perfect the art of producing high-quality content consistently? Well, it’s not as easy as you might think. Delivering unique and entertaining website content takes skill, determination and finesse, but if you stick at it you can be successful.
How can your business create relevant and consistently high-quality content?
When you are creating or reviewing your website’s content with the aim of improving your search engine rankings, then you should consider the following factors:
- Provide information that is unique and genuinely interesting, so that you can entertain and inform at the same time.
- Don’t have duplicated content on different pages, or say the same things repeatedly, but using different words. Panda will spot this.
- Spell and grammar check everything as a matter of course: poor grammar and bad spelling not only makes your site look unprofessional, but can affect your ranking.
- Try to put an original or personal perspective on the information you post: have the courage and belief to give your opinions, not somebody else’s.
- Present a balanced, even-handed view of the topic you’re discussing and show both sides of the argument.
- Create content that is worth bookmarking: if you can write content with the right sort of balance people will return to your site time and again.
- Provide specific, in-depth information which is of value to the readers.
- Always credit your sources, and don’t pass off someone else’s information as your own.
If you can manage to concentrate your efforts on producing high-quality content, you will undoubtedly create a high-quality website that performs well in the search engine rankings for your chosen keywords. This is an evolving, organic approach to search engine optimisation that no longer focuses purely on link building and targeting factors known to be relevant in the search engine algorithms. However, it is still important to optimise for those known factors. It’s also important to remember that search engines view a website as a whole; so poor quality pages may adversely affect a site’s otherwise excellent ranking, and drag its reputation down. This can still be the case even if there are many other individual high-quality pages on the website. Try to enhance all of your pages so that the quality remains consistent: if this isn’t possible, then remove the low quality pages until you get a chance to improve them.
