Best Practices for Updating Site Content
“Good SEO” is multifaceted. There’s more to it than just making sure your website looks good and has all the technical elements needed to show up in SERPs, though this is beyond important. And it’s more than just selecting good keywords for your H1’s, title tags, and meta descriptions. It’s also about using these keywords in optimal ways for each page of your site. “But I will just stock my pages with my keywords and that’ll be that.” If this is your thought process, please reconsider.
When writing content for your website, take into account the following…
Newer is Better
The adage that what is new is better does not ring true across all aspects of life. But it does when you are writing content for your website. Take what you have (or don’t have for those sites out there heavy on the images and light on the actual written content), and rewrite it to include your newly selected keywords in a manner that you would like to read it.
If you do have preexisting content and are reworking it for a new SEO campaign, change it up enough that it looks new but gets the original point across. The best novels weren’t written in one session.
Revise. Rework. Reconsider. And have someone outside of your industry check your work to see if it even makes sense.
Do Not Pack Keywords
This might seem like common knowledge, but you’d be surprised by the amount of websites out there that are packing as many keywords into every sentence just so they appear and are recognized by Google, among other search engines. But refrain from the allure of doing this to your site.
Your website should be your passion, and the writing within it should reflect this. While Google does reward sites for using the keywords found in their Title Tags and Meta Descriptions, it also hates when it crawls sites with sentences teeming with nonsensical phrases and unreadable content. Take your time, figure out the “theme” of the page, and write like you were explaining your business / services / brand to your mom, who mightn’t know exactly what it is. Have a conversation with your site visitor as opposed to throwing them a grip of ridiculous babble.
Be Topical / Be Informative
Staying on topic with what it is your brand / business is all about is undoubtedly important. However, also staying abreast of industry trends and augmenting and catering content around these trends can further cement you as a thought leader. If your business is music, and your site is still talking about the “breakthrough album from Ace of Base that drops later this year,” you are in need of content updates in a bad way. Be aware of updates in your industry and adapt your content to them.
Link Around
When writing for the pages of your site, it’s AOK to link around to other pages on your site. While this is a gray area for a good deal of the Internet, what with the continuing strict measures Google is placing on backlinks, etc., when you are referencing your own content from within your own site, go ahead and do it. In fact, “exact matching” is even okay.
Main takeaway: Writing content for your site based on new keywords and your want to drive more traffic to your site shouldn’t be a painstaking task. If you are passionate about your website and driving more awareness around it, you should approach this process with an eager attitude and the want to deliver the best experience for your visitors as possible. Remember, there are about 45,975,893* other websites out there that want exactly what you want, so how are you going to be different, and therefore better, than them?
Write on!
*Estimated for effect
