We often come across fantastic businesses that have brilliant products and services to offer, but unfortunately struggle with search engine ranking. This is such a shame, not to mention frustrating for the business as the internet is one huge pie and everyone is fighting for a bigger piece.
There are so many reasons why investing in your business website is a good idea, if not essential for surviving in the competitive online market. It’s like having a beautiful car but having no license to drive it. If you really have great products to sell or services to offer, whether you can offer amazing value or specialise in a niche market, your website is the face of your brand, so it needs to look good!
So you might now be thinking ‘what makes a website good in the eyes of a search engine and potential customers?’ In answer to that: lots of things. In attempt not to babble on for too long, below is a bullet point list of summarised points;
- Content- text- Content needs to be fresh, original and unique, it needs to provide useful information that isn’t simply spammed with keywords because search engines are getting cleverer and more advanced; they pick up on this! Quantity is essential for search engine ranking, but quality is equally if not more important.
- Content- graphics- It may seem obvious, but don’t over complicate things. A website with great graphics may be pleasing on the eye to potential customers, but even though major search engines like Google can read most types of pages and files, search engines are in general text based. This means content needs to be in text format in order to be crawled, however Google can now index Flash content.
- Size- The more pages and more content you have on your site will improve search rankings no doubt, but as mentioned- content needs to be good quality and not the same regurgitated stuff. The broader your website, the better- but don’t just create pages for the sake of it. If you have nothing more to say, then offer free resources to tempt web users to visit and re-visit your site.
- Regularly update your site!- This is really important for search engine ranking as search engines pick up on fresh content. Once a search engine creates its search results, these are by no means permanent and are constantly updated to provide more accurate results for the user. If the information on your site is outdated, your search ranking will drop. Simple things like creating a blog, regularly refreshing text on your site, contributing to forums and submitting fresh content to other sites will help keep your site active in the eyes of a search engine.
At the risk of losing you to a coma, we’ll leave it there. These really are summarised points and there is so much more to be said! But if you go away having learnt anything, let it be this- your website is what sets you apart from your competitors and is possibly the most important part of your online business. If your business is worth it, make sure your website is too.
