Google’s major Panda updates in May and again last week have put a major emphasis on site content. Google now wants to see the quantity, quality and a frequent change of an effective website’s content if you want to be easily found in their results. The message here is you can no longer just develop a static website and leave it as it is. We have numerous clients who have not touched their site in years. They enjoyed excellent indexing on the first page for quite some time but are seeing most all of them lose their positions with the recent major changes that have taken place.
We revamped our company’s website several months ago with the goal of setting an example for an optimal effective website presence based on these changes. A primary homepage feature is a lead-in of our weekly blog articles written on a rotation basis amongst our staff here. Each of us has professional insight pertaining to our specific jobs that we relay for subjects concerning website design, social media and general Internet marketing. Our homepage also features our Facebook and Twitter feeds.
So we have a combination of static foundation content and graphics, a blog conveying weekly changes, a Facebook feed that conveys daily changes, and finally a Twitter feed that presents new activity several times a day.
The challenge is, once having committed to this foundation, it requires a disciplined on-going engagement in order to be successful. Of course, it’s much easier for us to hold ourselves accountable to our scheduled writing and posting of blogs and social media feeds. After all, it is what we do every day. There is also constant communication and meetings to ensure we are keeping to our planned message campaigns.
It’s tough for many of our small business clients as it compels having to plan and implement theirs – something many struggle with finding the time for… and this is only the beginning.
What Does it Take to Have an Effective Website?
As I said, it starts with establishing the site foundation and committing to a routine to continually maintain it. For highly competitive online service-based businesses like HVAC, attorney’s or real estate entities, there is no choice but to adopt this strategy to effectively compete online for that elusive first page – first position in Google.
If your business can keep to a strict posting schedule with good information that your audience benefits from, then it makes it much easier to adopt more personal and engaging techniques we’ll be talking about later to solidify your brand online and increase your search engine indexing. For a pre-exposure of how this works take a look at this video from Whiteboard Friday.
For us, it has paid off with increasing what was already a strong organic seo indexing in the major search engines as well as generating response on a personal level from the information we have been continually offering through our own effective website presentation. Our primary purpose was to provide relevant information that we know our audience has an interest in. However, we are also thinking of ways to get a bit more personal in engaging them so that we are the company that is on the top of their mind if they need or are referring our services.
Until next time…