To many people, “fresh content” brings blogging to mind. Depending on your offer, your brand, and a number of personal factors, that may or may not be true.

How a Blog Can Help Your Website

If keeping a blog sounds fun to you, and you’re able to generate the topics needed to update a couple times a month or more: fantastic. It’s an excellent way to keep your search engine optimization in tip-top shape—a way to use SEO keywords that meet the needs of your audience. And that’s the crux of it. The purpose of the blog is to be useful to your website visitors.

When people come to your website, they have questions. They might be looking to buy your offer, or they might be looking into who you are as a business. They also might just be looking up an answer to a general question they have related to your field.

• A fitness instructor might write about how to supplement marathon training with strength exercises.
• A tailor might write about simple sewing tricks like how to replace a button that’s popped off your sweater.
• Someone who works for a website design company might write about deciding whether to blog or not (OMG that’s what is happening right now).

That’s right: you are a subject matter expert! What do you know that your customer might not? While it’s important to keep your content high-level and concise on top-level pages of your website, blogging lets you get into finer detail about things your audience might be curious about.

What Your Blog Shouldn’t Be

At the risk of dating myself, I come from a time where the reason one needed a blog was so they could share their inside thoughts with the capital-I Internet. Blogs were synonymous with pouring your heart out to strangers, and dare I say being a bit…emo. (Yes I had a Livejournal, a Xanga account, and asymmetrical bangs with a side part.)

That honor is now reserved for one’s social media accounts. Blogging is now largely the domain of thought leaders and businesses. Sharing on your business blog shouldn’t be about keeping a public online diary.

Am I saying you should keep it sterile and impersonal? Not if you want people to read it. In fact, if you’re unable to muster the enthusiasm to keep up regular blogging, or if writing in general fills you with existential dread, just don’t do it! There are other options.

Refresh Your Content without Blogging

There’s more than one way to refresh the content on your website. Here are a few other ideas:

Update your products or offer information regularly.

If you’re like most businesses, you don’t have one single offer that stays exactly the same year after year after year. Even if the offer is the same, there are still elements about it that are different. Going into detail about your offer gives you more opportunities to display how they change. Maybe you added an additional service to your package, or a new flavor of kombucha, or you changed the design of your bicycle frames. Tell folks about it on your website.

Outsource the content to your customers.

Your customers can do work on your website for you, although you will have to do a little legwork to get them to do so. Frequently asking for reviews, then posting snippets of them on your site, can provide the social proof to folks that you are out there killin’ it on the regular. And it reminds the website crawlers that your page should continue to be indexed and prioritized.

Show off a little bit.

Did you just finish up a cool new project? Are the photos currently on your website looking a little stale? Get yourself some new photo or video and get them online. Updates that include visual content can be effective in getting positive attention—and keeping it.

Do What Feels Right

If you like writing, and you feel that you can share something with your customers that they’ll get value out of—get clickety-clacking on that keyboard. If that doesn’t seem like the best use of your time and energy, keep working on the things that are. It’s that simple.

And no, I am totally not listening to Fall Out Boy right now. Well, not right now anyway.

1. Who are you and how did you get into my house?
2. How do I find good keywords without having to spend a bunch of money on online tools I won’t actually use that much?
3. How do I incorporate words that the search engine robots will like without actually sounding like a robot myself?

The truth is, SEO keywords give your website a better chance of getting traffic. And you can, in fact, use them without sounding like the flying saucer dropped you off on earth and told you to “act natural.” All it takes is a little bit of thought and a little bit of research after—and I can’t stress this enough—getting into your ideal customer’s head a little bit.

Pick Keywords and Phrases that People Will Actually Search

You’ve probably heard us say this before, but nobody knows your subject the way you do! That’s both an encouraging line and a word of warning. On the one hand, you’re an expert, and you know what product you are selling or what services you are offering inside and out. On the other, yes you’re an expert, and you think of your product or service in the language of an expert…which means that you run the risk of discussing your product in a language your customer doesn’t understand at all.

Think about it. A person who just wants to fix their back pain is probably not going to do a web search for “integrative medicine.” They’ll probably just look for something like “help for back pain.”

Once you’ve got a word or phrase that you’re confident a customer might search, use it to generate a list of other words. There are plenty of tools online to do that. Some of them are expensive, but some of them are free. For example—you can use the Google search bar as a free tool by typing in your keywords and seeing what it suggests. 

Sure, it might seem tricky, but if you don’t want to spend money on Google Adwords or another subscription, this is another great way to use the power of algorithms to your advantage. Once you’ve got a collection of about 10 keywords, you can get started using them on your web pages.

Don’t Overdo It

Back in the early 2010s, you might remember seeing SEO keywords and phrases used in ways like this. 

“Do you need linen tunics in Portland, Oregon? We are here with all your linen tunic needs right on the beautiful Portland waterfront. Get ready for summer with a breathable linen tunic!”

Gosh, any idea what the key phrase is in that piece of poetry?

Do not do this. Nobody likes it, and Google won’t reward you for it anymore. Here’s why.

In a past blog I talked about how your SEO content should be usable, relevant, high-quality, and fresh. Repeating the same word over and over again isn’t going to make people want to read what you have to say. When people don’t engage with your website content, your bounce rates (the speed at which someone closes out of your site) get higher, and your rankings will actually go down.

You should try to use the keywords in more than one place on your page. The best places include:

• Your title
• Your H1 (i.e., biggest and first header on the page)
• At least once in your copy, as close to the beginning as possible
• In the filename for the featured photo on the page
• In the alt-text for that photo

But if it sounds super weird when used in a particular place? Just don’t use it there. And if it sounds weird EVERYWHERE, you should probably find a different keyword.

Try Different Keywords If You Need To

Once you get started using Keywords, don’t be afraid to experiment. One of the best things about the internet is that you can always edit your work! Keep track of your metrics and see what seems to be working and what isn’t. Notice a phrase that you’ve used to optimize your page isn’t getting any traction? Go back to that list of ten words you researched earlier and try one of those instead.

SEO keywords are just words that have to do with the product or service you’re offering. If you pick the right ones, you’re on your way to better search engine rankings, more eyes on your website, and ultimately more sales.

To keep the definition simple, website “content” is anything that the website contains that informs or entertains the client. Things that make your site work well and look nice, including layout, color scheme, form fields and fonts are not under that umbrella. When we say “content,” we’re talking about blogs, sales copy, photos, videos, audio, comments, and reviews.

Your content is what makes people want to visit—and hang out on—your site, and it’s also your main method of communicating with the crawlers that index it. (Not sure what a crawler is? Check out my last SEO blog.) To help your content to get and hold the attention of both the search engine and your potential clients, there are a few parameters to consider.

Is your content usable and relevant?

As I emphasized in the first blog in this series, content optimized for search engines should be relevant and authoritative, and those two categories also pertain to whether the content is useful. People use search engines as a way to answer questions for themselves. Every time the search engine gets a query, they seek information that will specifically answer the user’s question. Anticipate what questions your ideal client would ask of you, and form your content around that. (Perhaps the most obvious way to do that is to make sure you’ve got an FAQ page on your site.)

On the other hand, if you use keywords, or a click-baity headline to attract customers to your site, but then don’t answer their questions, they’ll probably lose interest right away. That will contribute to your “bounce rate,” which will knock you down a few pegs in the search rankings. 

Additionally, writing content that has nothing to do with your product or service will be out of step with what Google has interpreted from your site thus far. If you’re selling sports equipment, Google will have observed that most of your content is about sports equipment. If suddenly you write a review of your favorite romantic movie, Google will not see you as an expert on that content. That article is not relevant to your expertise, and probably won’t be ranked highly.

Are you offering high quality content?

Quality is tied to relevancy and usability, but it also has to do with how much care was put into the content creation. While you want your sales copy to be snappy, and you don’t want to bore your audience, search engines do prefer pages with more content on them, usually around 300 words or more. There are ways to reach that mark without the dreaded wall of text, which I’ll discuss a little later. 

Additionally—and you may think this goes without saying—excessive grammar and spelling mistakes are going to make your content appear to be lower quality. Yes, the crawlers can tell. (All the more reason to hire a copywriter or editor to help. Wink wink.)

Do you keep your content fresh?

If you go to a website and see that, in their footer, their “copyright” hasn’t been updated in 2 years, what would you think? Would you wonder whether or not the business still exists? 

You, as a human being, may know that the business is still active, but if there haven’t been any recent updates on a website, the search engine may think it has been abandoned. Search engines like your content to be frequent and varied. It’s how they can tell your business is still active, and that you’re making an effort to provide relevant information to your customers.

When you’re thinking of how to regularly update, you might think first of a blog. It’s true that blogs are a great way to let people and the crawlers know you’re still in the game. Depending on who you are and what you’re selling, however, you might rather be covered in literal spiders than have to write on a regular basis. Luckily, a blog isn’t the only way to freshen up your website content. A few ways you can frequently vary the content on your site are to: update photos, add new products, encourage reviews or comments, add videos, or alert people to special offers.

Hopefully we’ve clarified SEO “content” a little bit for you. Don’t let it intimidate you; if you’ve already got a business, you know that you have something to offer. Just think of “content” as another way to reach out and let people know all about you, what you offer, and the way your business has been growing or changing. And if you need a little help figuring out how your content could be better, we’d be happy to help you out.

I apologize for the arachnid symbology, as I often have to when discussing SEO. 

Let’s talk about crawl accessibility! If you read my last blog “What is SEO Exactly?”, you might remember that I talked about something called “indexing.” That’s the process where search engine bots find your website, then “crawl” through and add every page to the digital library that makes up the internet.

Build a Crawlable Web with Your Site Structure

You are responsible for making sure these crawlers don’t have to jump from page to page with no links for them to follow. Every page on your website that you want to be easily found should easily link back to your homepage URL without too many other pages in between. You can think of these as “internal links”—and the more you have of them, the more likely that the web crawlers won’t miss a page.

(Note: This doesn’t mean that you have to put everything on one page! In fact, we don’t recommend doing that from an SEO or a content strategy standpoint. It just means you’ll want to make getting from here to there as simple as possible.)

Let’s say you’re selling a peplum top on your store’s site. Linking from the homepage can be as easy as… [Homepage] → [Shop] → [Tops] → [Peplum]

That’s three clicks, and the highest recommended number is usually four. And depending on the way your homepage menu is set up, it could be even simpler than that. You might have a “Shop” menu item that drops down to show all the different clothing-item categories customers can choose from. That means you get from homepage to peplum in two clicks.

A good standard to keep in mind: the more vital the content, the fewer clicks it should take to get there. If an item or topic is more specific, then it’s okay if it takes more clicks to get there.

Make things easy for the robot spiders, and people will be more likely to see your sassy shirt in search results.

Search Engine Crawlers Don’t “Get” Images or Animation

What you’ve heard is true: your audience loves video! Here at Upswept, we also love to use photos to give all our readers a feast for the eyes. But while the presence of these photos make for diverse content and a great user experience, getting a search engine to pay attention to them requires some extra setup.

When a search engine spider crawls your site, it doesn’t see the images that many of us do. They understand HTML, which is made up of a lot of words. There are two ways to communicate the meaning of your images, video, or animation with words: file names and alt-text.

If a photo you want to use has a filename like “IMG1212.png”, that doesn’t give the crawler any useful information. Using a filename that is quick and relevant to the content of your page, like “Purple-Peplum-Top.png”, is going to bump up the relevance of your image a lot more, especially if the name of the page is in the file name, too. Just make sure you don’t use more than 5 words.

Nearly every website content management system has a field for alt-text when you load up a photo. Leaving that space blank is a missed opportunity. For alt-text, you can use a few more words, but you should keep them honest and concise. 

Another important, non-SEO reason to do this is to make your site more accessible to people with visual processing disabilities, or anyone navigating your site using assistive technologies. Setting up alt-text is a winning idea all around.

Other SEO Opportunities to Consider

There are a couple other places where people miss easy SEO content opportunities. For example, in addition to images, the crawlers can’t read PDFs. If you have information in a PDF that’s important to a search engine, consider copying that content to an actual web page, and save that PDF for your more direct marketing efforts. 

Similarly, search engines also can’t parse audio files! So, if you want the content of a video or audio file to contribute to your searchability, consider springing for a transcription and including it on your website.

There are also important ways to boost your crawl accessibility that, if you’re not a web developer, you might need some help with, including page redirects, security certificates, and submitting sitemaps. And if you’re looking for some help with that, I happen to know somebody who can take a look.

In microseconds, the algorithm delivers its results. These results come from a never-ending process of collecting data from every website on the internet and indexing them within a virtual library.

And it’ll probably turn up something like: “SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of increasing quality and quantity of traffic to a website through organic search.”

Right now, there are search engine spiders (also called “crawlers”) wandering all over the internet. These crawlers follow strands of the world wide web, using links to travel from one site to another, then record every web page they can find and rank them according to their usefulness.

And the “usefulness” bit is where your SEO efforts come in, because search engine optimization isn’t primarily for the crawlers. 

The crawlers are trying to determine what *people* want when they search for something. And that means SEO is, ultimately, for people. You are not writing for Google, or Bing, or any of the other search engines out there. 

You are writing for your client.

Organic search means you are not paying to be featured, you get there by what might be considered “merit.” Like establishing a reputation in the business world, SEO is an ongoing process, and you build it by paying attention to changing search engine standards and adding more and more of the right kind of content to your site.

What Search Engines Look For

The search engine wants to answer queries (i.e., what people type into the search bar) with content that is relevant and authoritative.

And that is why SEO should be part of your overall marketing strategy, not just some technical thing that’s off in a world all its own. And that’s why, when you’re doing it, you need to get in a sales and marketing headspace, way more than you need to get into a “tech” headspace. You need to consider it along with the words you use across all of your marketing, print and social media included, and all be part of building a cohesive overall strategy or individual campaign. 

Granted, there’s a lot more than just marketing that goes into SEO, and some of it is pretty technical. I don’t even think I could cover it all in ten blogs, but let’s start with a general overview of what you need to take into account when you are trying to make your website appeal to both human beings and our robot web-librarians.

The Elements of Good SEO

In future newsletters, I’ll be going into each of these points in depth, but the following elements are things to consider when you are doing SEO work on your website:

• Crawl accessibility
• Good content
• Powerful keywords 
• User experience
• Shareability

If this seems like a lot, that’s fine. It is a lot. But as long as you work on your website with an eye to how helpful and easy-to-use it would be for someone else, you’re on the right track. Stay tuned for more info on how you can use your site in a way that satisfies both your customers and our search engine overlords.

Making your website findable is one of the most difficult tasks in creative branding online. To be findable, your website needs to be search engine friendly. This is accomplished with a number of techniques under the banner of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. If you’re not familiar yet, take a look at my previous post on SEO Basics.

One simple technique is to create user-friendly URLs that permanently link to the different pages of your website. These URLs are ideally custom, short, easy to read, and use keywords that people are likely to search for when searching for your business. They should also be accurate to the information that’s on the page.

Sound like a lot of work?

It’s really not with WordPress. We do love building websites on WordPress, and one of the reasons is how easy it is for users to work with. Changing the URL naming conventions of your website is very straightforward, and making a custom URL for any given page is a breeze. This lets you name important pages of your website based on keywords people might naturally associate with your business. A page’s current permalink is located below the page title on the “Edit Post” page. Changing the naming conventions of every page automatically is found in Settings > Permalink Settings.

 Upswept Creative is a Portland based web design and creative branding company. Someone in need of web design services may use the search terms “website,” “professional,” and “Portland.” So, I commonly include these terms in custom URLs for different pages on our website – blog posts, service descriptions, even the main landing page. The more pages that have these keywords, the higher the search engine ranking will be for those specific terms.

If you need more guidance on where to start, Yoast is a tool that helps make sense of all this keywords business. It’s a WordPress plugin that outlines common  SEO techniques for each of your WordPress pages, and empowers you to take control and make adjustments to your site for better SEO. It allows you to define many different aspects of a page that directly affect how a search engine interacts with your website, like keywords, URL, and meta-description.

Identifying and defining aspects like keywords and meta-descriptions is closely tied to the core of your brand. Finding your brand center is what Upswept Creative specializes in, as well at the practical, nitty-gritty aspects of web design.

If you need some help with your website and SEO, we can help! Schedule your free consultation with us today.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of building your website in a way that makes it easier for a search engine to find it, and give it a high-ranking in search results. Think of it as improving your website’s communication with search engines. I’m not going to lie, implementing good SEO can be technical and tedious. That’s why I’ve written this simple guide for some SEO basics. Besides, good SEO principles overlap with qualities of a user-friendly website.

PAGE TITLES

Most search engines utilize tools that transpose key information from your web page into readable, user-friendly search engine results. For example, a page’s title tag will often appear in the first line of a result if the content matches the user’s inquiry. This is a great place to have additional information about your business. Try to think of what someone might search online when looking for a service or product you provide. This might include the name of your business, a quick summary of what your company does, or some services you offer.

EASY URLS

A good URL often means one that a human being can easily recite from memory without confusing anyone. Most people keep this in mind when choosing their URL, but page titles are just as important! URLs are included in search results, so you have another opportunity to include relevant terms people searching out your business might search.

Many web hosts make this easy to achieve by letting users define static URLs for individual pages. In WordPress, for example, you can find this feature by logging in as an Admin, navigating to Settings > Permalinks. This will display your options for how to structure your website’s URLs.

GOOD CONTENT

It seems obvious, but having good content on your website is an essential first in enticing the right people to visit. Everything else I’ve talked about in this guide won’t be as successful as it could be if your web content falls flat. Make sure your subject matter is directly related to your business and brand goals, and use good web-design principles. Now that’s good content!

Good design is what Upswept Creative does. We’re offering a new packages, all centered around helping you build your brand with elegant design:

• Brand Essence to design your perfect look and authentic brand message
• Online Smarts to infuse your online presence with beautiful branding
• Empire Builder to tailor your web site to YOUR specific goals, so you can step up your business game!