“Quality content is the number one driver of your search engine rankings and there is no substitute for great content.”
"Five Ways to Improve your Site’s Ranking (SEO)" Michigan Tech Marketing Department
Small businesses, including businesses with profiles on Storeboard.com, can boost their clientele in many ways. One of the most effective ways is to improve their websites so prospective clients will seek them. Improving a website can also help a company maintain its current clients.
Many prospective clients, however, won’t even see the improved website because they don’t know the company exists. That’s why companies should make achieving higher search engine optimization (SEO) rankings a priority.
Quality writing is the best way to simultaneously improve the website and the website’s SEO ranking. Writing tips to improve SEO rankings include:
1. HAVE A NEWS BLOG: Yes, a company’s website should inform prospective clients about everything it does, but a blog that includes news articles might distinguish itself from other websites that advertise and perform those same services. A news blog gives a company a chance to offer its readers valuable and objective information about subjects that are relevant to its industry. Companies that post news articles on their blog can show up on Google news searches.
2. WRITE ABOUT THE INDUSTRY: Company X’s news blog should include articles its leaders have written so it can position itself as an industry expert. Company X should demonstrate its expertise via articles that will help its clients understand the importance of industry trends and, most importantly, offer tips that will be valuable to clients. Other companies could post these articles on their websites and, thus, increase Company X’s SEO rankings. These companies can also create a backlink that spurs readers to go to Company X’s news blog.
3. STAY FRESH: Innumerable SEO experts have written that companies should update their websites regularly. Thus, small businesses should be pro-active about looking for pertinent industry news and writing articles that will demonstrate their expertise. “Search engines want to offer users the most current, fresh information available,” according to North Seattle College’s “3 Easy Ways to Improve your Website Traffic and Ranking with SEO.” “Updating your content on a regular basis tells the search engines that your website is dynamic, ever-changing, and most importantly up-to-date.”
4. BE CONCISE: Articles on websites should be half as long as articles in print publications, according to the University of Chicago’s “Writing for the Web” article. Sentences and paragraphs within the article should also be concise. A 500-word article with 10 paragraphs and 20 sentences is much easier for readers than a 500-word article with five paragraphs and 10 sentences. Using bulleted lists can often be better than using sentences.
5. BE SIMPLE: Articles on websites should be reader-friendly and free of industry jargon. That means writing for readers as if you were having a conversation with them. “Writing for the Web” recommends writing in the first- or second person. It’s important to remember that most readers only visit a website for 10 to 15 seconds so companies need to present their information in a welcoming fashion that will encourage people who access their websites to stay longer.
Although writing to improve SEO rankings is important, "Five Ways to Improve your Site’s Ranking (SEO)" reports that good writing is more important.
“Never sacrifice good writing for SEO,“ the article says. “The best pages are written for the user, not for the search engine.”
This is the second of a three-part series that will be published in the next week on helping businesses improve their marketing campaigns and SEO efforts.
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