Make sure you have RELEVANT content
This sounds REALLY basic, but is one of the most common mistakes website owners make. Your website needs to have relevant content in abundance. Relevancy can be determined in a number of differnet ways, from the site as a whole, to the section of the website to the individual page itself. There is a methodology used by the search engines called latent semantic indexing, and it is a way in which the search engines can gauge the relativity of your page to other pages within your site, and to other websites within your marketplace targetting the same keywords.
Your websites relevant content as a whole
What does your website offer to visitors? Almost every website will have a single word which sums up the main focus of the offering. For this website, the single word (or phrase) is SEO, so every single page of this website needs to have content which is of interest to somebody searching for SEO. This sounds very simple, but some of the services we offer dont necessarily automatically fit into this nice neat pigeon hole. We offer Social Marketing which does not immediately have any relevance to SEO, but the pages within this site look at Social Marketing from an SEO aspect, and reference the effect your social marketing may have on keyword targetting and your overall rankings in the search engines. By writing the content in this way, we are building relevancy and improving our chances of being ranked for the main keyword “SEO”.
Page specific relevant content
Within each page on your website, you will have defined a specific subject matter. If you have an ecommerce website, the page may be describing a particular product, or on a blog it may be discussing a particular item of news. Either way, you will have chosen a title for the page which in a few words lets visitors know what that page is all about. By remembering the golden rule of humans first, that title should accurately reflect the actual text on the page itself, and if it is a well written, ORIGINAL piece of work, then the text should be relative content all by itself. If you find yourself veering off in a different direction or discussing a different issue/subject then you should either split that new content into its own page, or redefine the title of the page itself to build relevancy for the text. Either way it is important that a human visitor who searches for a term, finds your site ranked highly then clicks through to that specific page finds text which suits the search they originally typed. If they dont, they will simply click the back button and probably never come back.
Most SEO is common sense, and the old adage that “content in king” has never been truer. The search engines are building ever more intelligent algorithms, and you should never forget the single purpose of a search engine is to offer relevant content to users based on the search strings they enter. If your website and pages have followed this simple rule, you are already massively help the engines decide which words are important to each page, and when you help the search engines they normally reward you with a high ranking. Contact Us to discuss how we can boost your content relevancy for you or to get more tips on how you can acheive this yourself. Relevant content by itself wont do everything, but without it you have lost the battle before you begin.
