Web Content | SEO Writing

Fresh SEO Content – A Cure for the Google Panda Blues

Was your website hit by the Google Panda / Farmer update? Google continually strives to help the cream rise to the top. After all, they want people to always have faith in their “I Feel Lucky” button. Google will continually make tweaks to their algorithm so that websites trying to “game” the system will slide off the first few pages of their  results pages. Continually refining their measurements will help surfers find what they need. Some tweaks and ranking measurement changes will go unannounced and others will pack such a punch that they’ll get nicknamed. If you market to prospective customers online, you’ll need to stay on the edge of your seat and buckle up because things can and will continually get bumpy.

Organic Google traffic can be a huge source of income for you. Of course you’ll want to do everything you can to help Google see your website as highly relevant to your subject matter. If Google sees you as relevant, it is more likely to send you traffic. The right SEO strategy can help you gain high search engine rankings for competitive and high-converting keyword phrases. Here are some strategies to help you ride out future storms, whether you’re just starting out in the world of internet marketing and SEO or you’re trying to recover from lost rankings due to the Google Panda update, the Google Farmer update, Google May Day, or some other major update.

• Build high quality backlinks
• Write fresh content regularly
• Write quality content
• Read your website traffic reports and ACT on them.

Quality Backlinks

Take the time to build backlinks that relate to your site. You can do this multiple ways, via: guest posting, article directories, press releases, and via social bookmarking. Hint: good content will naturally attract relevant backlinks.

Fresh Website Content

Is your website updated regularly? If so, there’s a greater chance that Google will let you keep a current high position in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and help you climb the ranks. Sites that don’t continually post new content are considered less value-driven by search engines. Search engine spiders have a job to keep crawling and providing new information and if you don’t feed them, they’ll pay much less attention to you and could eventually stop visiting your site and sending traffic to it. Hint: Hire a good SEO writer to write content for your site on an ongoing basis.

Quality Web Content

Whether you’re writing web content for your main site, blog posts for your site’s business blog, press releases or articles for other sites, or some other piece of online content, quality is of paramount importance. Fresh content = good but don’t sacrifice quantity for quality. It’s important that your site feeds the search engines but even more important that the people who read it find it valuable.  Why? Not only will people finding value in your content be more likely to become customers but other benefits could happen as well, such as:

• getting content bookmarked on social media sites,
• getting linked to from authority sites in your niche,
• keeping your bounce rate low. (Google does look at bounce rate when determining your site’s score in terms of relevance and value for readers.)

Read Your Traffic Reports

Understanding what’s happening on your site in terms of visitors and traffic sources can help you figure out what you’re doing right and could help you figure out what to improve upon. By reading your reports you’ll find out where traffic comes from, which sites are linking to you, which keywords people are using to find you, what your bounce rate is, and more. Use this info to capitalise on what’s going well and to tweak what is not.

What’s The Next Update After Google Panda?

Google will continually release changes to help it succeed in putting surfers on sites that will enhance their online experience. If you strive to be the cream that rises to the top, you can survive those changes. Keep your site interesting, valuable, and well-optimised for search engines, and do your best for the best online experience for visitors possible and you can minimise the impact major updates will have on your success. Don’t take a chance on black hat internet marketing techniques. It’s not worth it.Any temporary change you get will be just temporary and could hurt your success potential in the long run.

Need help getting fresh web content on a regular basis? Talk to me at http://www.danaprincewriting.com about some options that could help you increase your SEO results and boost your website traffic.

How Keyword Dense Does My Web Content Need to Be?

Are you struggling with your web content or SEO articles in terms of keyword density? You may have heard a magical number of how many keywords to use or how dense your articles should be. If not, perhaps you’ve heard that keyword placement, latent semantic indexing, keyword silos, or keyword proximity are important. You’ll read varying advice so you might be wondering just what to follow.

As an experienced SEO writer I can tell you that there isn’t a magical formula for keyword success with SEO writing. Too many variables are at play so it’s impossible to determine the magic content formula for your business.  Yes, keyword optimization and integration are importnat but it’s not a good idea to simply  make your content as dense as possible unless you consider many other factors as well. Deciding on some best practises, however, is very smart.

Here are some SEO writing best practises I follow:

• Choose a handful of keyword phrases for an article or content page.
• Integrate some keywords into titles and subheadings.
• Make sure keywords are used near the beginning and the end of the article or content page.
• Make sure some important keyword phrases are hyperlinked and lead somewhere useful and logical.
• Add an image to the content (if possible) and give it a keyword phrase name.
• Where possible, integrate categories, tags, and solid meta descriptions.

What’s the most important piece of SEO writing advice?

Make the content count.

Regardless of how dense that piece of online content is, it’s got to be useful. It needs to serve a purpose for the reader otherwise it won’t matter where it’s indexed in search engine results pages. Yes, you want to get to the top of Google and other search engines but even more important is the need for the content to drive the visitor to action.

Need help with your web content strategy? Contact me. I help people and businesses achieve online success. I’m an experienced web content writer who understands the importance of writing for the web in a way that appeals to the eight-legged spiders and to the two-legged traffic that could become customers. Contact me for an SEO writing quote. I offer web content, e-books, press releases, social marketing management, blogging and other online writing services that can help you boost your online success rate.

Business Blogging Tips – Optimizing Your Image Tags

Are you optimizing images in your business blog?

Business blogging is smart for businesses. It is something that can continuously drive traffic to your site via direct and indirect methods. When search engines see regular content updates for your site, their spiders will continue to visit and index you, which will drive new traffic your way. When those spiders crawl the new content, they will pay attention to several attributes. Images are important from an aesthetics perspective but they’re also important for your site’s SEO (search engine optimization). Optimizing your blog content is important. Optimizing images can help you get found and increase your traffic levels.

Image Tag SEO

Images do represent a thousand words to many people. They add context to your blog and help catch the eye of visitors and can cause them to pause and read. And, they also represent a lot to search engine spiders who help search engines make determinations on where to send inquiring traffic.

As the spiders crawl your site, they look at various site sections to help them determine what your site is about. The more of those attributes you populate strategically, the more chances you have of getting found by visitors you are targeting — your target demographic.

Search engines cannot “read” your images. They know that there is an image there but they don’t know that it is relevant to your subject matter unless you say it is. The alt image tag is a place for you to say what the picture contains. If you use this space strategically you could drive up the perceived relevance by search engines who will measure those images. And photo captions can help you with SEO as well as help you drive a message home to visitors. The more tags on each page you utilise, the better chances you have of getting great SEO results.

There are a number of ways to draw attention to your site via search engines and images are just one of the many ways that performs as double duty because they enrich the user experience *and* help you with your search engine optimisation. Your images could also get indexed online and send traffic to your site independently as well.

Are you taking advantage of all your meta data and tags on every single page of your site?

A few SEO tweaks to old content that neglected to populate some important page elements could make a difference to rankings and traffic levels. A good SEO strategy leverages the power of SEO in conjunction with online marketing strategy. If you’re not already highly knowledgeable in this area and  / or don’t have the time to dedicate to learning it and staying on top of continuous changes to search engine algorithms, hire an SEO specialist to help. And if you want to do your own SEO, hire an SEO writer to complement the efforts you’re putting forth.

(Need help with SEO writing and blogging? I can help.)

photo: Billy Alexander