Hail to the King, Baby
Content is king, but not in the sense that your content rules over your website with an iron fist and taxing every visitor for a look. Instead, content is the king to your website’s traction and ranking with search engines by looking at how often you build on and change up your content. Basically, you want to stay fresh.
Always updating and changing your content so that your website doesn’t become a smelly, unfresh fish that washes up on someone’s search results. This isn’t about making content for the sake of content, it’s about making content to satisfy your visitors, that focuses on your keywords and stays relatively fresh.
Through search engine optimization (SEO), search engine bots will begin to pick up on the type of content you’re producing to get visitors the information they are looking for. These bots pick our your keywords and organizes them accordingly to the type of content you produce to fit the parameters one would search for that particular website. SEO is how every search engine, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo for example, organize websites in a way that rewards them for following their rules and punishing others who try to gain the system.
Trying to Pull a Fast One, Aye?
Link sharing and keyword spamming were just some of the old ways a company website would to try to pull a one-up over on their competitors. Nowadays, simply having frequently updated content relating to the website’s general focus will be enough to satisfy general freshness. Of course this is only one of many factors involved in SEO and ranking websites, for now we’ll just be focusing on the one factor.
Whether you’re a blogger, news channel or a fast-food chain you want to create frequent content for your demographic and to benefit your ranking. Frequent content can mean changes to your website’s main body or creating new articles to add to the website. Some example of this might include new promotions in a website’s banner and background or creating a news feed of reviews, news and podcasts that are offered to keep visitors interested as well. Sure you could just build a blog about cooking, write about a new recipe for visitors to try and wait a week. However, your content’s quality is of equal importance to its frequency. Quality means just as much as updates, meaning more frequent indexing from Google which helps evaluate your ranking.
Adding photos, infographics or even video content will greatly improve the overall quality of your content. This will help engage your viewers and deliver the information in a faster and more effective manner. Video is definitely the best possible way to deliver good content quickly and effectively when done in a professional manner. You could also focus on original photography or graphics to add to your content to keep things interesting, while using stock photography sparingly.
Stay Fresh
So now that we have the basics down; frequency, quality, and focus. Let’s determine what it means to be fresh. When I say frequency, it shouldn’t be once every other month, but frequent in the sense that it can stay fresh to viewers who are also follow the same content. A news site may have to publish an article almost hour to keep up with demand whereas an online store can go almost a month simply because they don’t need to. Fresh is what fits your content and it needs you to keep it that way.
The amount of change is also an important factor, you need to think big. Details are still an important factor in fine tuning a website, but for freshness needs nice chunky bits of content, roughly a few paragraphs of just text for the bare minimum. This also applies to new pages as well. New pages for services or information are a great way to show that your website isn’t dead in the water.
Finally, the freshest way to make sure your content is as fresh as you can get. Fresh links. Yup, fresh links that go straight back to your content. By far the best method is through social media; facebook, twitter, instagram or whatever fits your website’s needs. You want people sharing and linking back to your website to tell search engines that not only your as fresh as can be but other people as well can back up your claim. You want to prove that you are the new fresh thing for what you do and can manage it.
Most major websites know this and manage these frequent changes regularly, especially because they’ve realized how much time and investment is needed to go into keeping the people’s interest through their web content. This is why we have these kind of online only jobs such as social media managers to not only promote but attempt to keep the business’s website relevant. Granted, not all major corporations do or even have to manage their websites with such frequency simply because their websites have been around long enough to claim their spot in search engines.
Keep’n it Real
A website’s age is also important to its freshness, it has a history associated to it that keeps it relevant. An updated website that has been around for awhile will be more noted than a new website. This is because a website that has been around longer gets the credibility of being among its ranks. This can be an issue for new websites trying to rise up the ranks, but as long as your website has a constant supply of content then there shouldn’t be an issue given at least a year. You want to be fresh and you want to be patient about it. Success rarely happens overnight. Quality over quantity. You just want to stay true and consistent to your website’s purpose. It’s best to learn as many new things as you can and see if you can incorporate them into your own website.