Do you have a blog that you love to read everyday? Or maybe you have one of your own that can be viewed by your family and friends that you use to share your personal thoughts and opinions on things. Having a blog on your website is an excellent way to improve the SEO of the site. This is because blogs allow you to keep the content fresh while making the topics interesting and relevant to your readers. As an Orange County Web Design Company we maintain a blog by updating it with interesting information that we believe will be relevant to our readers. Let us know if we’re doing a good job!

Last week, we discussed how using keywords can be advantageous to the SEO of your site. Now we can move onto Volume 2: Content, where we’ll discuss advantages and disadvantages that occur when writing content for your site. The main idea to keep in mind with writing relevant content is that you’re writing for a specific audience; put yourself in their shoes. If you can think of things from their point of view- what subjects will they find relevant to them, what events will they find interesting- you’ll be on track towards writing SEO friendly content.

Content Advantages

Unique Topics

With so much information available on the internet, it’s beneficial to have content that’s unique to only your site. Now, this may be difficult to achieve if you are in an industry with several other companies that offer the same services, but if you highlight information about your company that makes you stand out, it will definitely make the difference in your SEO. For example, if you are a local artist, you could write content that’s specific to how you got into the business. Or you could keep a blog that details your latest work and concerts. Just as how you would want to present yourself as a unique individual in person, you should do the same for the content of your website.

New Topics

Keeping your subject matter new and fresh is just as important as keeping it unique. Search engines will always judge the age of the documents on your site, so having new information with make it appear more relevant. Think of your website as a news source; if it’s not current, it’s not news!

Formatting

Much like how using heading tags around your keywords is useful, using different font formatting such as bold, italic is helpful as well. Just make sure you don’t over do it because it can have an adverse effect as well. For example, don’t bold the content of an entire page because that’s not only bad formatting it’s bad design!

File Size

Extremely long pages are generally not looked upon favorably by search engines. You can solve this problem by breaking up large chunks of content into more pages. This will not only improve your SEO, but also make your site more aesthetically pleasing (most people don’t have the patience to read long blocks of texts).

Content Disadvantages

Improper Coding & Design

Now, search engines definitely do not discriminate against poorly designed sites (we’ve all seen our share), but having a improperly coded site can lead to it not being indexed at all. Not having your site show up in a search engine listing at all is a big no.

Illegal Content

For the sake of SEO (and your own moral integrity), do not use copyrighted content from other sites without permission. This could result in you getting kicked off the search engine and even worse, you having to deal with legal issues.

Invisible Text

Before the advent of google in the early world wide web era, invisible text was all the rage. Website owners would fill their entire background with invisible text of relevant keywords. However, now that search engines utilize smarter algorithms to determine site rankings, you will be penalized for doing this. All of your content should be relevant to your users, not the spiders that crawl your pages.

Duplicate Content

Having duplicate content does not make your site appear larger, even if that content may be new. Avoid doing this so that you don’t get penalized by search engines.

As an California website design company, we always try to think about our target audience that see things from their minds eye when choosing what information we showcase. If you do the same with your own site, we’re sure you’ll see great improvement with your SEO results. Stay tuned for our next blog where we’ll discuss Vol. 3: Metatags!