Spinfield: Web marketing trends today, tomorrow, and beyond…

Search engines can be tricky. Search companies don’t give away very many of their secrets when it comes to organic search algorithms that they use. Despite this obstacle, there are certain Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques that have been proven to help your rankings.

One of these SEO techniques may seem much more simple than it actually can be to keep up with. Content. Relevant, engaging and fresh (updated) content. You may think that you already have all of the content that you need from your marketing, white paper, PR or other company efforts. Simply using this possibly boring, outdated or redundant content won’t fly in the world of search engines.

Web site content includes all of the content users see such as headlines, titles, page titles, and the bulk of the content. It also includes tags such as alt, meta and image. Search engine spiders crawl all of this content to arrive at a list of the most relevant pages when a search is performed. If the spider does not find the proper keywords in your site…your site will not show in the organic search results when you want it to!

Google has guidelines for writing content on your site. And it probably can’t hurt to follow rules that Google sets forth! The pointers that they list are all important to incorporate and make sure your site follows. Here are their main content guidelines:

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

Along with this it is important to maintain and update any content. In many cases it is important to have someone/hire someone to manage the content of your site. The more your content is updated and changed the more spiders tend to return to your site, increasing your relevance in the search engine’s eyes.

If you want Internet users to find your site while searching (which I would assume most people do), content is critical. The key to SEO is how your content is written and maintained. One thing that can make this content maintenance much easier is a content management system (CMS). This system allows those who may not be technically inclined or familiar with HTML to update content on a Web site with ease.

Just to add our own plug: If you are interested in learning more about a content management system, you can contact us about our newly designed, convenient and customizable CMS, Creatasphere!

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