A Beginners Guide to SEO
Search engine optimisation can seem a thoroughly daunting task. Updating the content of a website to make sure that Google and other search engines can accurately find and index it, can seem a huge task, but there are some simple rules for avoiding disaster.
Web3 Consulting has a comprehensive SEO strategy, and our in-depth analysis of exactly how to best present your website goes much further than the tips below. However, bearing these ideas in mind might just help you on your way to best optimising your website.
What’s the word?
The phrase “keyword” is often discussed when talking about search engine optimisation. It seems fairly simple: find the words you’d like people to associate with your product or service, and draw your target audience to your website using these words or phrases.
However, this does not mean that you should use these important words or phrases to excess, this is a practice known as “keyword stuffing”. By adding your keywords in an illogical fashion throughout the text on your website, you risk the wrath of Google’s search crawlers, which will automatically assume the website is illegitimate.
Content, as they say, is king, and this phrase correctly alludes to the idea that content should be of a high quality, written in a way that can be understood by a native speaker and in a fashion that makes sense. Randomly adding your chosen keywords will only lead to confusion for your audience and punishment from search engines, which have evolved to weed out this type of practice.
Where’s the content?
The website makes sense, and there’s an adequate number of keyword phrases without the text sounding too confusing. The website would seem to be the perfect condition for attracting high search engine results – however, there’s one problem.
Though well-written, relative content is great for attracting the attention of search engines, the frequency and length of content is also incredibly important. If web pages are too short, the legitimacy of the website is called into question because of the perceived weakness of the content.
Likewise, if the website is not frequently updated, it can suffer a drop in rankings because search engine crawlers will assume it is less relevant, given its lack of activity. This means that website owners must keep content fresh to keep a hard-won place at the top of search engine results.
Looks familiar…
Content that has been used more than once on the internet immediately flags up trouble in the eyes of search engines. As search engines have developed more intelligent and more complex algorithms to rank websites, they have focused more exclusively on good quality and original content. The unique characteristic of content allows the website to be seen as an authoritative source.
There’s also the issue of where the other version is located. If it’s on a disreputable website, the duplicate content will automatically flag up issues, dragging your website down with it. It is far too risky a strategy to use the same content in more than one place, even if that content is from another asset that you in fact own.
Things to remember:
Creating original, adequately lengthy, interesting content on a relevant topic to your chosen keywords is the best way of convincing search engines to crawl your site. The better the content available, the better your website will seem, and the search engine ranking results will benefit from the effort.
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