The SEO Journey Continues…

This entry is part of a recurring series on optimizing your website for maximum visibility online. The process is called search engine optimization, or SEO, and we first touched on it in our earlier blog entry, “The 10-minute-a-day tip for more search engine referrals”. As SEO is a fast-evolving area of expertise, we’ll continue to revisit it in future additions to the Bell Business Blog. This time out, we take a look at the concept of frequency.

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In the early days of the web, the operative goal was to build a presence. The thinking was simple: build a website and they will come. Unfortunately for many small businesses that built websites, they never did come. In many cases, traffic was light, and revenues didn’t budge.

For a website to generate traffic, web surfers – your future customers – have to know you’re there. If you sell copper pipes, and your site doesn’t show up when your prospective customers search for “copper pipes,” you may as well not exist.

Fortunately, there are ways to improve your rankings in search results so that you will show up when customers go searching. This post explores the concept of frequency.

In SEO terms, sites that are updated frequently get noticed – and ranked more highly – than sites that are simply built, then left unchanged. So if you’re hoping for your company’s site to be included in the list when customers search for copper pipes, or whatever it is that you sell, a site with dynamic, fresh content is always preferable to one that hasn’t been updated in months, if ever.

Some change-friendly elements that can help increase your site’s frequency quotient include the following:

Blogs make it easy to keep new content coming on a regular basis. Beyond the search engines, they also offer you a great opportunity to share your expertise, which gives customers an even better reason to keep coming back.

News feeds can automate the process of publishing fresh content on your site. Many popular tools are available to aggregate headlines from any source imaginable. Even better, feeds keep the site updated even when you don’t have the time to do it yourself.

User-submitted content like customer testimonials, supplier profiles and industry expertise can also add another critical dimension to the site.

While no one has unlimited time to keep a website updated, there are enough tools out there to at least partially automate the process and keep your site visible to the search engines even when you’re too busy to dive in and do it yourself.