SEO - Updating Your Website

Have you updated your website lately? Added anything new? Changed something around?

If not, you're missing one of the most important things you can do to help improve the search engine ranking on your site.

You can add all the keywords you want, have an appropriate page title, etc., but if you don't update your site regularly, the search engines are going to think there's nothing important going on on your website and are not going to rank it very highly.

And, the longer you go without updating your site, the lower your rankings will drop.

I've seen this happen with my own site and sites I manage for clients. Sometimes a few simple changes are all it takes to move up a couple of notches in Google.

How often should you update your site? My best advice is to update your site with something new at least once a month. However, take a look at your business - what are people expecting? If you're a site talking about computers, you better have an update at least once a week in that fast-moving and ever-changing industry. If you're a landscaper, then people are expecting to something new at least every time the seasons change.

Take a look at your business, take a look at what customers expect, but then also think about search engines. If you don't consider your website important enough to update regularly, then search engines are not going to think it's that important either!

SEO info on MetalBeach.com

SEO - "Contact Us" Page

Do you have a 'Contact Us' page on your website? Great. It's important to have a page for customers to understand all of the different ways they can get in touch: email, physical location, fax, etc.

However, one of the most important features to include on your website is your phone number and address - on every page of your site.

By doing this, it makes it easy for customers to contact you without taking the extra step of going to the contact page - AND it can help improve SEO results. How? By repeating your city and state name on each page, it gives the search engines another item to look at when indexing your pages.

If every page of your site talks about your business but includes no information on city and state, search engines will not (may not) connect the two - the fact that your business offers a certain service or product - in a certain location.

Include your business name, phone number and address in a sidebar, at the very top of the page or in a footer. This gives customers the information on every page - and it will help with your SEO.

Redesigning a Website and SEO

I'm happy, then I'm not.

And so it goes with my website.

I just did another redesign over the weekend and am happy with it - for now. I also added some new text and changed some fonts around.

Sometimes I change things because I find something I like on another website, sometimes I'm just bored with the current design. I do know - and I tell my clients this - that your site should be updated regularly to help improve the SEO. One thing that search engines look at is whether or not the website has been just 'sitting there' doing nothing or if it gets updated on a regular basis.

Search engines monitor how often your website is updated and then place a certain level of importance on that factor - if search engines see that you update your site regularly, they will (generally) place a higher ranking on your site.

Another thing that happens when you update your site is that it tells search engines how often to check back in. If you only update your site once a year, then you're going to find that when you do an update, it may not show up for a while.

However, if you update your site each month, the search engines know to check back in monthly for new material.

So, there's a bunch of reasons to change your website around - to attract new customers, to provide a new service or product, etc. - but a big reason is for the SEO.

More on SEO at MetalBeach.com