29 September 2011
People are searching online for your products or services. Are you being found?

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow People of Birmingham, the UK and the world have been, are and will be searching online for your products or services. Are you being found?

We’ve been talking about website visibility again and more specifically, search engine optimisation. Does it fit into your inbound marketing strategy? Building in bound links as Google still gives a weighty 75% importance (or thereabouts) to links in their PageRank algorithm. Even after the Panda update, the only difference is quality, NOT quantity.

It’s important for your website to have quality links linking to it and develop quality content.

Let’s think for a minute that you are walking in a supermarket down the frozen section and looking at all the choices of ice cream and frozen yoghurts. Lots of choice, right? Now make everything free! What will you choose? That’s simple – you’ll choose the best.

Google doesn’t buy, people buy

An important message we’ve taken from this is that Google doesn’t buy. People buy. Make sure your content is good for people, first and foremost.

When people are searching for your products or service online, if you don’t have the benefit of great brand awareness you need to give popularity to your website in other ways. One way is quality inbound links as we’ve already mentioned. However, Google also now puts importance on visitor behaviour when they’re on your site taking into account things like how long they stay on the site, what pages they click through. The longer some one stays on your site, the more brownie points you’ll get from Google.

Building quality content that WILL get linked

So how you do build quality content that will get linked to and will keep people on your site?

• Content should be written as though you’re going to hand it into an editor to get “red penned”! It should be a great piece of work that you’re proud of, take time on it and as a rule of thumb a minimum word count of 500 words is optimial.
• Content can also include video, graphics and slide shows. Mix it up a little, Google likes variety too.
• If you’re content is good people will link to it via sites like Digg and Reddit plus you’ll keep them on your website longer. People do actually read!
• Make sure your pages click through to other pages, internal linking is great for SEO especially if keywords are the hyperlinks. If you’ve included a great editorial page which is where people enter your site from search, then make sure you link through to sales pages or other relevant content depending on what is appropriate.
• Think of a search term or keyword phrase like an abbreviated question. Looking at things this way can give you clear battlefield indicators as to what stage in the buying process people are at and can help you to provide appropriate content to those searchers make for a better, quality experience.
• Learn from your best competitors, not to steal content and ideas but to take inspiration from what they do that you like and what readers like.

Ask people what content they’d like to see and keep an eye on what people are talking about. If you’re a roll your sleeves up and get stuck in kind of person, you can findideas for generating website content right here and there’s no time like the present, start today so that tomorrow people can find your business online!

Good quality website content has been the elephant in the website for a long time, people are finally talking about it. Are you ready to talk about? If you are then our helpful, friendly word guy is standing by to take your orders.

Once you are found it’s important your web design is top notch if you are to convert this visitors into customers.