Continuing our SEO topics we’d like to add a little more information about building great content for your site.
It’s quite depressing to see the massive effort and revenue poured into a website while the website owner ignores the most important element of ‘SEO’ which is great content.
Yes, you can tweak your website title. Yes, you can strategically place proper HTML headings on your site. But the ultimate goal of a search engine is to find the best content on the web. Therefore it makes absolute sense to have the best content to improve your search engine ranking.
In the end Google can be quite forgiving for ‘brain dead, stupid’ HTML and coding mistakes on a site IF the content is really awesome! (Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JD55e5h5JM).
Before we jump into what good content is let me clarify some myths and bad habits that some website owner’s use in an attempt to trick Google and other search engines.
Hidden text
When it comes to content Google is basically referring to text on your site. Text it can read and text it can add to its giant search engine database. When a Google user searches using a keyword such as “t shirt” Google returns websites that contain the searched word. “In theory” the more the word is used on a site the more chance the site is about the word. So following this theory some rather silly website owners attempt to trick Google by using what’s referred to as “hidden text” on their site.
In Google’s view hidden text is:
- Using white text on a white background
- Including text behind an image
- Using CSS to hide text
- Setting the font size to 0
Using white text on a white background was an old trick to flood the bottom of a website page with hundreds of keywords in white text so it would not be visible to the user on a white background but, as the theory went, would be visible to Google. Well, they were right about that. Google will see the white text on a white background AND Google will remove you from their index. That equals REALLY BAD!
Source: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353
Meta tags
I covered this in a previous post which you can read here. But essentially the keyword meta tag is no longer used by Google and the description meta tag has limited use. Read my previous post for more information on this topic.
So what makes good content?
The content should match your products and service and suit your audience and what you expect your audience to search for. As much as possible the content should be rich text on your site. Don’t go overboard and produce a novel, but consider what people might want to search for. i.e. “custom t shirt printing”. “t shirts sydney”, etc.
Here are some tips for writing content that can assist Google and Google users in locating you website and learn a little more about your products and services:
Who are you? “We are a custom t-shirt printing business…”
What do you do? “…specializing in t shirt, hoodie and custom apparel DTG digital and screen printing.”
Where are you? Remember many Google users include a town or city in their search queries so mention the local area you service. “We are located in Whittier, California…”
Where do you serve? Include names of local towns and cities that some of your local customer may search “… and ship nationwide from Los Angeles, Hawaii to New York and Florida.”
What do you sell? Mention common products and brands you sell. “Gildan, Hanes and American Apparel…”
Why are you good or important? Customers like assurances so give it to them! “With 30 year’s experience, we guaranty to ship your product within 3 days from order.”
Be truthful, concise and ensure it reads well. While the content you create will be used by Google it should be designed for the humans that visit your site.
Most important of all – SPELL CHECK! Copy and paste you text into Word and run the spell checker. Once you created the content on your site get other people who were not involved in the content’s creation to read it over and tell them to be brutally honest about what they read. You want to make sure it’s perfect!
Updating content on your DecoNetwork website pages
There are several places you can add value-building content to you site.
Website pages:
The ‘Website Pages’ section of DecoNetwork is a great first place to start to edit the content on your site.
- Log into your DecoNetwork website
- Browse to Manage Store > Website pages
- Select the page you want to modify such as your Home page
- In the Body Settings below select Configure next to Body Content section.
- Using the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor you can enter the content you want to show on this page.
- You can move the content section up or down by selecting and dragging the cross arrows up or down near the section title.
- Click Save to save your changes.
Dedicated information pages
Content does NOT need to be on the homepage of your site. If you want to boost your website with great content about your printing processes don’t flood your home page with text that will be distracting to your website visitors. Make a secondary page (or landing page) dedicated to your printing process which will benefit you in different ways:
- Your homepage won’t be crowded.
- The landing page will with a dedicated URL with the page title included. i.e. http://www.yoursite/page/printing_process
- Even though a user may enter the landing page (in other words, searched for ‘printing processes’ in Google and ended up on your page www.yoursite/pages/printing_process) they can still click through to your home page or products from this page.
- Log into your DecoNetwork website.
- Browse to Manage Store > Website pages.
- Select Add page and enter a name for your page.
- Configure the widgets and content you want to show on this page.
- Click Save to save your changes.
Spend some time on your websites content and don’t worry if you don’t get it right the first time. Your site is organic and can change at any time. Keep tweaking your content and monitor your website traffic to see if your changes lead to improvements.
