Web Site Content Management Basics
Keep Your Content Fresh for Search Engine Marketing and Placement
A few helpful rules to manage web site content with an eye toward search engine marketing and placement.
Even smaller web sites, meaning those under 15 pages, can achieve successful results (meaning sales and visits) on the web with some very basic search engine marketing and old fashioned TLC (tender loving care). Like any business endeavor, once your site is online and speaking to the world for you, you can achieve better search engine placement and make your customers happier by ensuring a few things, listed below.
Add Fresh Web Site Content
This sounds very basic, but many developers build a site once and leave it there for all eternity without making a single change. At the very least, build in a News or Press Release page that you can update once per month, but ideally, you will have multiple sections dedicated to new product and service information, customer testimonials, announcements, and more.
Don’t be afraid to break long pages into multiple pages, with each page focusing on a particular idea, such as product or service.
Add Relevant Content, and Plenty of it
If you’ve created a web site to help you sell widgets, giving your visitors nothing but a price and a 10-word paragraph won’t help you in the engines very much. Why not tell us everything your customers might want to know about the particular widget, such as when it was created, what one might do with this widget, or provide links to what others have done with this widget. Allow your customers to review the widget and share those reviews with other customers. Get them talking.
Get creative in widget terms. If your widget is hand lotion, for example, link it up with a massage table and let your visitors know that your particular hand lotion works great on all parts of the skin, not just hands.
Stay Current
Nothing tells a visitor that you don’t care for your site more than displaying old information. News items dated several months ago, or worse, over a year ago, scream amateur. Search engines learn how often you update your site, and if you only update once per year, they won’t send spiders to index your site. That, and your customers won’t return either.
Consider the Search Engines for Site Ranking
As you are adding new information to your site, not only consider your customers, but consider the search engines as well. Focus on one or two particular keyword phrases, such as “Search Engine Marketing”, “Search Engine Optimization”, or “Search Engine Placement”. Add the target phrases to your Title Tag, include them in your Meta Tags, and most importantly, discuss them intelligently in your page copy. Search engines are hungry for text, so why not give them what they want to help you achieve successful search engine placement?
Following some of these content management rules is basic to search engine marketing and placement. Provide your customers, and the search engines, with fresh content and you’ll be sure to have a successful web site.
