Search engines have come a long way from the early days of optimisation. Remember the days when pages would contain lists of keywords in an attempt to get to the top?
Fortunately those days are gone. Today’s search engine model is considerably wiser in the way it crawls content. You can’t con search engines with reams of keywords as it will be seen as spamming and therefore negatively affect your website’s search engine rankings.
Populating your site
The more pages you have the more times you’ll be crawled by search engines and the probability of appearing in search results increases.
However, don’t be tempted to duplicate pages. Each page should be relevant to the product or service you are trying to sell and duplicate pages are the equivalent to spamming, which does not do your website any favours. Remember: do not attempt to hoodwink the SERPs (search engine results page), they do not react kindly! Yahoo says:
Pages Yahoo! wants included in its index:
- Original and unique content of genuine value
- Pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary
- Links intended to help people find interesting, related content, when applicable
- Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page
- Good web design in general
When populating your site remember that search engines rank individual pages rather than entire websites, hence apps like Google page rank. Your homepage is probably not going to be your most important page and linking externally to only this page is a plan we do not recommend.
Copy
All copy you have on your site should be relevant and to the point.
When updating your content bear in mind that it is all relative. If you update five pages a month you practice good SEO, but if you update 50 pages a day, you practice great SEO.
To ensure frequent, fresh content try starting a blog and add your own news releases. Giving your opinion on industry news can also help create a following online.
Search engines weight newer content more highly in the SERPs, this is why news articles and blogs appear in the rankings soon after they have been posted.
Optimise each page around one key term.
In our experience updating website content on a regular basis helps keep pages fresh and boosts rankings as search engines appreciate up-to-date information.
Images
Ensure image optimisation across the site to benefit from traffic from Google image search. To effectively optimise your images you can keep images on a folder level rather than a subdomain, use a descriptive name for the image as it affects the image content and include a keyword if relevant. Use alt text for all your images and give it a caption where possible.
Also consider new content such as video.
An Introduction to SEO
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