Basecamp's Blog

Google is king (Image via CrunchBase)

Your web site responds to attention and nurturing just like any living being. The more attention you give it, the better your search engine rankings.

You see, Google (and this is the 600-pound gorilla to pay attention to) figures that the more attention you give your web site, the fresher your information and the more useful your web site will be to people.

So, if you nothing else to your web site other than spruce it up once a week, you’ll rank higher in search engine results than your (similar) competitor who hasn’t tweaked a page all year.

Here are some easy things you can do to freshen up your existing web site:

1. Revise wording. Trim wording and make sure the important content is within the first couple of sentences.
2. Add SEO-friendly wording. A look at your competitors’ web sites may give you an idea of words and phrases that work. If not, write to me and I’ll run a free SEO test for you using up to 10 search engine terms you supply. This test will tell you how you’re performing for key words, and how your competition is performing.
3. Upload pictures. Pictures will also help to keep people on your web site (we also call this “stickiness”).
4. Include additional downloadable information. Google looks very favorably upon .pdfs, for instance. When it sees you offering .pdfs, Google figures you want to help educate people, and education is tops on Google’s list.
5. Start a blog. If you have a wordsmith on your staff, this is a no-brainer toward higher search engine results. Just address industry topics in simple, understandable terms. If you don’t have a wordsmith, you can still blog. Quote industry publications (giving credit, of course). Upload photographs of your products. Take questions from your public, and answer them.

There is plenty more that you can do to continually freshen your site. For now, aim to do a little something every week. And watch your stats go up. Oh, you do have a free Google Analytics account, don’t you?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Design, Marketing, Search engine optimization (SEO), Web design, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.