Is Your Content Up To Snuff?

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You may think your website is doing everything it can to bring in traffic and business, but is it? If you’re not familiar with how popular search engines like Google rank websites when they return results after an inquiry, it’s possible that your site could be getting lost in the crowd. Check to make sure your content is working for you with these considerations.

Is the Content Optimized?

When creating written content for a website, writing with commonly searched keywords in mind is important. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of tailoring content, often through the use of keywords, to make a website rank higher in search engine results than its competitors. Search engines want to return the most relevant results to their users, and while many factors go into deciding which results end up on page one and which end up on page 20, the density of information on a website relevant to the search engine user’s query is a significant one.

The trick to being sure that your written content is optimized is knowing which keywords should live throughout your website. What are potential customers for your business typing into the search field on a browser? Are they using broad terms or specific ones? What specific words and phrases are they using and are those exact combinations present on your site? The research involved in understanding that information can be daunting, as can generating content to match the results.

Companies that offer SEO writing services are excellent tools for any business looking to make sure its content is optimized. These companies understand the best practices for successful SEO and work with professional writers to create high-quality content that meets search engines’ standards. These companies help create everything from blog and social media posts to articles that link back to your business, all to improve search engine rankings.

Can It Be Crawled?

Crawling is a process through which search engines look for new or updated web pages. Once a website or page has been found through crawling, it can be added to a search engine’s index, a collection of websites that the search engine knows exist. After being placed in the index, a website’s position in the rankings for search results can be determined.

If a website cannot be crawled, it can’t be ranked. In order to be crawled, a website owner must either submit the website’s sitemap to the search engine or have links to their web pages on sites that the engine has visited before. The webpage must also be publicly accessible since search engine crawlers cannot get to information locked behind login pages. There are also formatting issues that can prevent search engines from being able to properly crawl a website. 

If a site is difficult to navigate, a crawler will notice and the difficulty will negatively affect the site’s rankings. This is why it’s important to have clear links between pages on a website. Crawlers also have an easier time scanning some kinds of content than others. For example, the text is easier for them to sort through than images. However, a visually engaging site is important for human visitors. To satisfy both crawlers and human visitors, use tools like alt text with images.

Crawlers analyze not only text and images, but also the overall visual layout of a site. Sites with cluttered or bad layouts may be rejected by the crawler and left out of search results. Another common misstep that can keep a crawler from visiting a site are links to the site that are part of advertisements or ones that appear on other sites because a business paid for them to be there.

Closing Words

Improving a site’s rankings on search engines involves a lot of work and research. Luckily, there are many services available to help ensure the content on your site is what your potential customers and search engines are looking for.

You may also like to read: 7 Golden Rules for Your Content Marketing Strategy

Featured Image by Firmbee from Pixabay

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