Infrequent Updates

Getting a new website is a lot like getting a new car. At first you’re in love with it and take really good care of it and after awhile you get over the “honeymoon” phase and its all downhill from there. This is a mistake a lot of new website owners make by creating lots of great content and backlinks in the beginning and over time allowing their SEO efforts fade to nothing.

The best way to prevent this is to create a weekly or monthly “to do” list of SEO activities that you can do over time instead of giving it an initial burst of effort and burning yourself out. For example: you can use every Monday to find 20 websites that you can get a link to your website from, and every Tuesday you can write an article, and every Wednesday you can contact other webmasters in your niche, you get the point. If you formulate a process like this it becomes much easier to stay up to date with your SEO efforts and it becomes a lot more organized!

Non-relevant content

After a few week or even months you might not be as motivated to write content. When a lot of people get to that point they try to use either non-relevant or non-unique content. Non-relevant content on your website can be a huge problem for you. If you’re trying to rank for fishing keywords an article about kittens is not going to help your website at all. That example might be a little extreme but that’s the idea. It might be tempting to just find something semi-relevant online and post it so you can say you updated your website, Keep content as targeted and relevant as possible at all times. Always be thinking as if you were in the users shoes: would I like this content? Is this what I was looking for? Would I come back to this site or purchase from them? Using non-relevant content can be appealing to take away the difficulty of finding relevant things to write about but it’s worth the extra effort.

Unique content

That brings us to point #2 – using non-unique content on your website. Do NOT use content on your website that is published on another website for SEO purposes. If you take articles or free resources and post them on your website it will not be indexed because search engines (google, yahoo, bing) only index content once and trash dupes. Any copies of that content remain out of the search engines and therefore will give you no SEO benefit to use. The search engines do this to assure quality and keep the user experience optimal for everyone.

Some people do what is called content “spinning” which is taking  written article and making it unique by using synonyms and different words through the article. This in theory sounds great – but it comes with a load of its own problems. The main problem with content spinning is that the content sounds terrible when spun 90% of the time. After using an article spinner or even hand spinning an article the verbiage and flow is usually ruined and the content becomes unreadable. Its OK to share content on your website that has been posted elsewhere (with permission) but you will receive zero, nada, nil SEO benefit from it (assuming that it is already indexed).

The major things to remember here are to keep your efforts steady and relevant. If you use these tips for creating and updating your website you’ll be ranking in no time.