V. Content Is King
If you are new to SEO, it might be a surprise for you that text is
one of the driving forces to higher rankings. But it is a fact.
Search engines (and your readers) love fresh content and providing
them with regularly updated, relevant content is a recipe for
success. Generally, when a site is frequently updated, this increases
the probability that the spider will revisit the site sooner. You
can't take for sure that if you update your site daily, the spider
will visit it even once a week but if you do not update your contents
regularly, this will certainly drop you to from the top of search
results.
For company sites that are not focused on writing but on
manufacturing constantly adding text can be a problem because
generally company sites are not reading rooms or online magazines
that update their content daily, weekly or monthly but even for
company sites there are reasonable solutions. No matter what your
business is, one is for sure – it is always relevant to include
a news section on your site – it can be company news or RSS
feeds but this will keep the ball rolling.
1. Topical Themes or How to Frequently Add Content to Your Site
If you are doing the SEO for an online magazine, you can consider
yourself lucky – fresh content is coming all the time and you
just need to occasionally arrange a heading or two or a couple of
paragraphs to make the site SEO-friendly. But even if you are doing a
SEO for an ordinary company site, it is not all that bad - there are
ways to constantly get fresh content that fits into the topic of the
site.
One of the intricacies of optimizing a company site is that it has
to be serious. Also, if your content smells like advertising and has
no practical value for your visitors, this content is not that
valuable. For instance, if you are a trade company, you can have
promotional texts about your products. But have in mind that these
texts must be informational, not just sales hype. And if you have a
lot of products to sell, or frequently get new products, or make
periodical promotions of particular products and product groups –
you can post all this to your site and you will have fresh, topical
content.
Also, depending on what your business is about, you can include
different kinds of self-updating information like lists of hot new
products, featured products, discounted items, even online
calculators or order trackers. Unlike promotional pages, this might
neither bring you many new visitors, nor improve your ratings but is
more than nothing.
One more potential traffic trigger for company sites are news
sections. Here you can include news about past and coming events,
post reports about various activities, announce new undertakings,
etc. Some companies even go further – their CEO keeps a blog,
where he or she writes in a more informal style about what is going
in the company, in the industry as a whole, or in the world in
general. These blogs do attract readers, especially if the
information is true, rather than the official story.
An alternative way to get fresh free content are RSS feeds. RSS
feeds are gaining more and more popularity and with a little bit of
searching, you can get free syndicated content for almost any topic
you can think of.
2. Bold and Italic
Text
When you have lots of text, the next question is how to make the
important items stand out from the crowd – for both humans and
search engines. While search engines (and their spiders – the
programs that crawl the Web and index pages) cannot read text the way
humans do, they do have ways of getting the meaning of a piece of
text. Headings are one possibility, bold and italic are another way
to emphasize a word or a couple of words that are important. Search
engines read the <b> and <i> text and get the idea that
what is in bold and/or italic is more important than the rest of the
text. But do not use bold and italic too much – this will spoil
the effect, rather than make the whole page a search engine favorite.
3. Duplicate Content
When you get new content, there is one important issue – is
this content original? Because if it is not, i.e. it is stolen from
another site, this will get you into trouble. But even if it is not
illegal, i.e. you obtained it for free from an article feed, have in
mind that you might not be only one on the Web, who has this
particular stuff. If you have the rights to do it, you can change the
text a little, so it is not an exact copy of another page and cannot
be labeled “duplicate content” by search engines. If you
don't manage to escape the duplicate content filter that search
engines have imposed recently in their attempts to filter stolen,
scrapped, or simply copied contents, your pages could be removed from
search results!
Duplicate content became an issue when tricky webmasters started
making multiple copies of the same page (under a different name) in
order to fool search engines that they have more content than they
actually do. As a result of this malpractice, search engines
responded with a duplicate content filter that removes suspicious
pages. Unfortunately, this filter sometimes removes quite legitimate
pages, like product descriptions given from a manufacturer to all its
resellers, which must be kept exactly the same.
You see, duplicate content can be a serious problem. But it is not
an obstacle that cannot be overcome. First, you need to periodically
check the Web for pages that are similar to yours. You can use
http://copyscape.com.
If you identify pages that are similar to yours (and it
is not you who have illegitimately copied them), you could notify the
webmaster of the respective site(s) to remove them. Also, you could
change a little the text on your site, hoping that this way you will
avoid the duplicate content penalty. Even with product descriptions,
you can add commentary or opinion on the same page and this could be
a way out.
Try the Similar Page Checker to check the similarity between two URLs.
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