Orange County SEO™ Blog

How Can I Help Search Engines Find My Site?

Search engines do their best to find what is popular and relevant to a user’s search. This means that there is a bloodthirsty, knock-down, drag-out fight among websites to be at the top of a search engine’s list. The best rankings are the ones that gain the best visibility and traffic. This is why it is imperative that you implement the use of search engine optimization to attract those search engines and become king of the mountain.

The field of search engine optimization is vast, there are a myriad of ways to help your site be easier to see and pitfalls to avoid when trying to create a place that users want to visit. Here are some tips to give you the tip of the iceberg of how you can start improving your site now. The world of SEO is constantly evolving, however, so don’t take this as the only information you need for better ranking today and in the future.

It’s in your interest to create a site that flows well and looks good. Paying attention to user interface and navigation, as well as making sure that content is well defined, interesting and fun to visit actually translates to search engines. A search engine’s ranking algorithms can actually tell by the amount of time between clicks if a person’s attention was attracted or detracted from a site. Higher quality sites mean more clicks, referrals and links which equals popularity which means getting a higher ranking when search engines find your site. Search engines can measure things like timing, anchor text, links and sources, so don’t sacrifice form for function or vice versa, they are both equally important when it comes to being seen.

It’s also in your best interest to make your content shine. Using visuals, examples, ways of illustrating the information that keeps users interested, engaged and even willing to pass on information is critical in maintaining the attention of your audience. Content is key, so be creative. There’s so much information out there it’s like white noise. It’s up to you to create ways of attracting attention by satisfying the curiosity of those you seek, and then posting things that keep them curious!

Orange County SEO can help build your site for SEO or give your current site a diagnostic and show you what steps need to be taken to create a mean, lean content machine that attracts the customers you want, and keeps the customers you have.

Evergreen Content

You want to make sure that your website has great content. Working with content masters, like OrangeCounty SEO is one way to make that happen, but even without their help you can have a website with content that is amazing. There is more to great content than writing about the latest and greatest in your niche market. Evergreen content is the gift the keeps on giving.

Evergreen content is information that will always be relevant to your market. There are topics in your genre that will never fall out of favor and will always be something that is searched for. Having plenty of evergreen content on your site is going to make it easy to have a constant stream of people coming to your site.

Think about the things in your market that never change. There are bound to be a few things that pop into mind right off of the bat. These are the topics that you want to write about and have content for on your website. The reality is that eventually this information might fall out of the mainstream, but if it is going to be potentially relevant for more than a year, it is considered evergreen. Read More »

What Can Go Wrong with Search Engine Technology?

In previous topics, we’ve defined search engine bots as these tiny and awesome secretaries of artificial intelligence, complete with beehive hairdos and pointy-edged glasses. These tiny secretary robots scour the web following the massive flotsam and jetsam of collected content in huge vats of data. From their tireless and spookily exacting meticulousness, they file and store the information until it’s “called up” by a person who has just typed something like “woolen sock knitting guide” into a search field on a search engine somewhere in a house across the planet. In less than two shakes of a lamb’s tail, the information is provided to the user, and woolen sock knitting ensues.

Of course, there are many common mistakes that website owners make, that confuse the process.

Link structures on a site that aren’t made well can stop a search engine from being able to reach the full content of a site. Another glitch is programming that accidentally fools a search engine into thinking that indexing the content is superfluous.

It is not uncommon for the mini secretary robots to be given unclear or garbled directives, so that they are left wandering around the Internet aimless, not busily filing information like they should be doing.