This competition from social networks cannot be underestimated; Google needs to supply really fresh content to drive its search results to allow it to continue to dominate the search market, if it’s index was out of date, we would all quickly go elsewhere.
The onus is now on us website owners to ensure that we provide clean, new content that Google likes and ranks highly.
But rather than been a chore, this also helps us from a conversion standpoint in that this new content will ultimately help us to have better discussion with our prospects online and help us to convert better.
So our question to you is ... how fresh is your website content?
Simply write great, fresh copy for your visitors!
Understand what terms your prospects might use to search for you in search engines and add them once to your page; but that’s all you need to do.
If your copy is fabulous and your page looks great, other related sites will link to you too, before you know it, you're doing great in Google and business is booming.
We have been approached once again about the Panda update from Google from clients wanting to know how they can avoid Google penalising their sites or to stop their sites from losing page rank.
Our general advice is not to panic, site owners who look after their site, enter into a natural looking link building strategy and get a decent copywriter to look at their site content should have nothing to fear – for the rest of you here are a few tips to help you.
Content:
This is now KEY. AVOID duplicate content completely and avoid any automated copy or content services.
Ensure all content is fresh and as new as possible.
If you want to distribute news items to other sites then ensure you post to your site first at least a week before you release it to other sites.
If you do have a lot of duplicate content then consider using robots.txt to prevent similar content from being indexed by the major search engines.
For those of you have do have the same content under different URL’s, use the link rel="canonical" tag to tell Google that they are the same (read here for more help on this: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html)
Title Tag:
Ensure that you have different Title tags for all your pages; ensure that the content of the pages matches the Title used. Keep your Title simple.
Description Tags:
As with your Title tags, ensure that they are unique on all pages and that they match the content of the page closely.
Inbound Links:
Avoid linking farms and other low quality links to your pages. This has become a major concern to Google as there has been an explosion of site getting unnatural links that can only come from a mass link building exercise. Remember links to your sites need to look natural.
Never pay for links.
Your plans
Focus on the quality of your content, and ensure that your visitors have the best experience when they get to your site.
It’s possible that in the near future Google and other major search engines mat start to look at use stats to determine what sites fair well in its results; if for example, Google has two similar sites (one with a bounce rate of just 13% and the other with a bounce rate of 86%, I know which one Google will choose to rank higher!)
If you need help with your website copy, then talk to us, we are ready to help you.
Google is up to it's regular trick of trying to improve the results for its users by removing spammy content from search results in its' latest algorithm update. They reckon it could affect some 11.8% of websites! Read more about it here.
We have been asked by a few clients why the new Google algorithm has affected some websites in the US (it’s going to be rolled out soon to everywhere else).
Our answer is simple, Google Farmer/Panda update simply targets low quality websites, it ranks sites on the quality that they provide their visitors and if this is deemed to be low – then the site will appear lower in search engine rankings.
Google’s Matt Cutts (and others) have discussed what they have done and why on various websites, and it appears that they class a site as being low quality when:
With Google's latest update, having well-written, unique content on your site will help gain better rankings in future, something ReadCopy has been forecasting for sometime now!
Googles own editorial guidelines tell you that Google loves fresh content; it loves to see a website growing by the addition of well written, information rich copy.
This is what copywriters do best; they can create unique copy for your site that keeps you active and alive within Google’s search results, meaning that in turn, you get more website visitors.
If you want Google to love you too, then consider ReadCopy (www.readcopy.com) for your website copy, or simply write great, new copy for your site yourself.
We have a new article back on our main site, check it out now
http://readcopy.com/articles/content for seo.shtml
Google is determined to ensure that when a user of its search engine wants to find something on the internet, they only see the best quality and highly relevant sites, this means that if a website has copied content from other websites or uses aggregated content from a ‘content farm’ or has copy that is just lightly spun from ‘content farm’ articles then they will be penalised.
They are also now penalising sites that do not have regular new content added.
Whilst this might be bad news for lots of sites out there, it’s great news for our website and our clients sites; you see as copywriters, we only write fresh, original copy that Google loves, meaning that all of our pages are indexed well for the keywords that search engine users actually use.
So check your ranking now using these easy steps:
1. Think about the keywords/phrases that a real search engine user would use to find your products and services (i.e. if you sell beds, maybe in the manufacturers brand names, or ‘kids beds’, ‘bed frames’, ‘slight beds’, ‘bunk beds’ or even ‘comfortable bed reviews’!).
2. Do your own search on Google to see if you appear; if you don’t appear on the first two pages then give up, 99.9% of users would have given up by now too!
If you don’t rank anywhere but you would like to, then you need to get in touch with ReadCopy (www.readcopy.com), we’re here to help you.