Continued from page 1
No matter how much you know there is always more out there and your visitors are probably well aware of that. If you fail to address all their questions, your visitors may very well leave your site in search of
answer. Once they've left your site it becomes other webmasters who now have opportunity to present benefits of their products or services.
Find all information that you can and make sure that you include as much as possible on your site. The additional benefit in doing this is that constant new information on your website will not only keep visitors coming back to find new information but search engines spiders too. If your site changes often spiders will pick up on this and will visit you more often. While this by itself will not improve your rankings it does give you an advantage. The more often search engine spiders visit your website faster changes you make will be picked up. The faster these changes are picked up quicker you will be able to react to drops in rankings. If you know spiders visit your site every second day and you drop from #8 to #12 you know that with proper tweaking to your content you may be able to recover that loss in as little as two days.
Are you an expert writer or do you have one on staff?
When you need a doctor do you read a book entitled "Heart Surgery For Dummies" and buy yourself a very sharp knife. Of course you don't and while your website may not be quite as important as your heart, it is how your company is being perceived online. This perception can be make-or-break of all your online marketing efforts.
If you are committed to attaining high rankings, to making money online and/or promoting your business through your website, shouldn't you also be committed to insuring that your conversions are maximized. High search engine positioning is important but so too is converting those visitors once they get to your site. You may be an expert in your field but if that field isn't writing, and you don't have a writer on staff, be certain to at least consider hiring one to make sure that your website is conveying message you want in verbiage that your visitors will understand. Assuming you choose your writer well you will not only have a well-written site but you will also gain advantage of having an outsider, who is more likely to write for people who aren't experts, creating your content.
If you feel that you are qualified to write your own content (which you may very well be) be sure to have it proofread by someone from outside. Find someone (ideally plural) from within your target market and demographic, and have them go through your content giving suggestions and criticism. Don't take it personally, every change they recommend is earning you extra money. Whether you implement changes or not you are learning something new about what people will want and expect to see on your site.
With Articles Come Links
Writing content is not just an exercise for your own website. We all know that inbound links to your site help rankings. Additionally, if those links can be ones that provide genuine targeted traffic you're doing very well.
There are a number of methods for driving traffic to your site with paid advertising, PPC, etc. however one of most cost-effective methods is to publish articles. Article writing is no simple task however rewards can be enormous. Articles server two great purposes:
- Increased Link Popularity - When you write an article and submit it to other website to post, they will generally link to your website from page article is on. Here's a completely legitimate, relevant, and quality link to your site.
- Exposure & Credibility - The added credibility that article writing lends to your business coupled with added benefit of visitors who come to your site directly from your article are invaluable.
When it comes to article writing there is little in way of more effective advertising. You will have to find sources to publish those articles on, but once you've done this time-consuming task you can reuse same list for future articles.
Get those articles on a number of quality resource sites and enjoy watching your stats and your rankings improve.
With Quality Content Comes Even More Links
Yet another benefit that derives from having a website with great content and writing articles is that, with time, your website itself will become a resource. If you provide great information that other people will find useful people will link to it naturally.
With so much emphasis in recent times on reciprocal linking some might think this is only way to get links at all. Believe it or not there are still webmasters out there who will link to sites for no other reason than they feel their visitors will be interested in it's content.
Build a good site with quality content, keep it easily navigated and create sections for specific areas (articles for example) and you will find that people will link to your site and may even link to specific articles or your articles index. Perhaps then your articles index is a good page to target an additional keyword phrase.
Next Week
Next week in part three we will be covering site structure and importance it plays in your rankings and in visitor experience. This will cover getting a spider through your site while also giving your visitors an easy path to pages you want them on.
Dave Davies is the owner of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning. He has been optimizing and ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may have about your website and how to get it into the top positions on the major search engines.
