Honestly, I've blogged about website content and SEO a lot. Yeah, a lot. But I found an article that's really good that I wanted to get to you guys. It's as if I wrote it. I completely agree with it and I know it's something our clients need to hear about:
The Future Of Content & SEO: How To Stay On Top (searchengineland.com)
Here are some of the excerpts that I love:
"The idea behind this shift was that great content should be rewarded, and that it would naturally garner valuable shares and trustworthy inbound links."
- This is what I always say about content you post being "bookmark worthy" or "share worthy" - same idea.
"A good user experience across all devices — smartphone, tablet, and desktop — has become an important consideration in search engine optimization, along with semantic markup that helps search engines to better understand the meaning of your content."
- This is about responsive design and microdata/structured data markup - this lets search engines help you more.
"Sixty-two percent (62%) of organic searches today show different results depending on whether the search was performed on a desktop or a smartphone."
"Smartphone penetration is forecasted to be at 74 percent in the U.S. by the end of the year, according to a report by comScore. Thus, the time is now to figure out how content and mobile should exist on your site."
- Yes, think like Google! If a search originates on a mobile device, you want to show results that work well on that device. And NOW is that gold rush. Do it now before your competition does!
"What we do know for certain is that the constant in SEO is the experience — and that experience stems from the type of content a brand creates and how it delivers that content."
- You cannot go wrong thinking about your website visitors and creating the best experience for them - be it the design, the layout, functions on the website or content. Content isn't king - the website visitor is king!
Just be awesome. Write great content, help people and solve problems. Write content that people would share. Make your design clean, simple and awesome so that it's easy to view, easy to navigate and just plain be easy to use.
Sometimes it's hard work keeping something simple. I've had clients see some white space on their website design and then want to fill it up with something. I then explain the benefits of white space and keeping things clean and simple. I just got off the phone with a client who wants a redesign and just wants everything more clean and simple. Doing that takes planning. If you eliminate too much, you'll frustrate users.
Our team is good at this because we have experts on staff and we have experience. We'll do it right because we know how.
Spend some time writing great content this week. If you're not sure what to write about, put a notepad next to the phone and whenever someone calls with a question, write that question down. This will help you. The only caution here is that you might not want to publish absolutely everything you know on your website. Hold some cards to yourself. Make sure people have a reason to call you and find out more because that human connection is what works. Your website is just to get them to call you.
-Tony
