Your Website – A Work in Progress that Never Ends

By Cristine Drach

August 27, 2009 — Tips for keeping it up to date so prospects can find you and find what they’re looking for.

Many companies will only update their website when information is no longer accurate. However the web has become a very competitive landscape and those who don’t optimize their websites will find themselves with very low organic search engine rankings. Consumers cited that gathering information from a company’s website is the most popular information gathering method (36%) when making a purchase decision (Marketing Charts). Businesses that understand the importance of continuously optimizing their websites are actively ensuring that buyers find their website first.

A good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy ensures that consumers will find your website, and a very important part of a good SEO strategy is relevant content.  When was the last time you updated your site for SEO? If you’re drawing a blank, it’s time to rethink and refresh. Here are some tips:

• Choose the three keywords that are most important to your business; these could be your top products or services. If you can’t choose just three, that’s okay, but the more you can narrow down your keywords, the better. This is your starting point.

• Now it’s time to analyze each page on your site. Mark each keyword as it appears on each page and create totals at the end. If your keywords aren’t appearing on each relevant page, or only appear once, it’s time to update the page. An update can be anything from tweaking the copy to an entire rewrite. Keep in mind that ideally you want to include your keywords on each page more than once.  However, be sure to write for you consumer, and not for the search engines. If your content isn’t relevant, or is badly written because you’re trying to use the keyword over and over again consumers are highly likely to leave the site.

• Make sure your keywords also appear in page titles (<title>), and page headers (h1, h2, etc) because this will tell the search engines that these pages are extremely relevant to organic searches containing your keywords.

• Examine the URLs for each page. It will help your organic search rankings if keywords appear in your URLs. If not, renaming your pages to include your keywords in URLs could mean starting from scratch with your search engine ranking. However, keep in mind when you create new pages, or create a new site, that it’s a good idea to include your keywords in the URLs.

• Keep your XML site map up to date. Whenever you update your site, make sure you also update your site map accordingly by changing the date of the last update. Once you’ve changed your site map, submit it to all major search engines. Each search engine has webmaster tools and tips to create and submit site maps.

• The most important meta data are the page title and the page description. The page title displays at the top of the browser and as the title of your organic search result. The meta description is the sentence that appears under the title in organic searches.  Be sure to craft a relevant sentence that captures the essence of the page in 25 - 30 words.  Although it’s debatable how important meta keywords really are to SEO, it certainly doesn’t hurt. Make sure your keywords support the text on the page, and narrow down your keyword list as much as possible; some experts suggest no more than fifteen words.

Small changes to your website will make a positive impact your organic rankings. There will always be updates and tweaks that you can make to optimize your site so that prospects can find it and the information they’re looking for. By monitoring key metrics and continuously testing copy and layout changes you will discover what works and what doesn’t, and slowly but surely your website will appear higher and higher in the organic search engine rankings. The bottom line is that your website is never truly finished.