When it comes to SEO, one of the things we advise our clients is that regularly updating their website with fresh, relevant, unique content is hugely important for SEO. Having a site built in a DNN CMS makes adding content pretty simple, so that’s half the battle, but, the other half of the battle can be the difficult part –what content?
There are a number of ways you can add fresh content to your website, blogs and news articles are an obvious place to start. We are increasingly recommending clients have an area on their site where they can add a variety of content, based around a magazine style layout which offers a visual and some descriptive text which can be expanded to see more. Using a mix of authoritative articles, blog posts, reviews or customer quotes, industry news, product updates, special offers etc. makes it visually engaging for the user and easier to keep the content fresh – which is hugely important.
So how do we make sure that the content we are creating is SEO (for SEO read Google) positive? The algorithms which are used to determine which results are served for search queries are complex and take into account many factors, including the user’s search history, search device, location and speed, how long users stay on your site, how many pages they look at, how engaged are they. A high bounce rate and a high rate of short duration visits to your site has a negative affect on your SEO.
One of the major factors which is prioritised is the quality and relevance of the content to the users search. No. 1 on Google’s ‘Ten things we know to be true’ list is 'Focus on the user and all else will follow'. Good quality content is not about ‘keyword stuffing’ this is an outdated method and does not fool anyone! The same is true of hidden or invisible text. A good benchmark to work with is to ask yourself - Will this content enhance your website visitors experience? Will it help them to make a decision about a product they may be interested in buying or help them understand what you are offering? Will it tell them something they need to know? Will it deepen their understanding of your business? Always keeping in mind that your content, whatever it is, should be relevant and useful to the user and unique to your site. Don’t be tempted to litter your content with Call to Action buttons and distractions. Authoritative pages should fulfil that purpose and that purpose only, it may seem counter intuitive and that it would impact conversion but these kind of pages rank high on Google.
Finding the time and the resources for this may seem difficult, because of this, many of our clients enjoy the benefit of a DNN Support Contract with a monthly allocation of hours which can be used for adding content to their sites as well as a host of other bolt-ons - great if you are struggling to find the time. If you would like to find out more about us and how we can help with your website’s SEO – please contact us.