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What can you say about October nights? Daylight hours are getting notably shorter, the BBQ's are being packed away, but this should have the positive effect for allowing more time to devote to your optimisation projects.
How much news or blog content per week do you need to influence your rankings ?
There are organisations that promote four or more a day, but do you actually need that many to make a difference?
News. This is the focus of this months newsletter.
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Matt Paines |
Higher Rankings through News and Blogging
For two years now we have advocated that websites need to change on a regular basis. Whether it be by having a blog or a news area, this in itself can be quite difficult. Especially as the discipline required to create new and interesting content on a regular basis, gets more arduous over time. Hence the need for news feed suppliers like feedangel.
The theory is, that to the search engines a site that is adding to its content every couple of days must be loved by someone. If it is actively receiving contributions it must be up-to-date and current. To the search engines this reinforces that the site has authority.
This month a good friend of ours who has been following our advice for years, a guy called Richard Oppenheimer ( www.appraisal360.co.uk), noticed that by making changes to his homepage, within a couple of days he would gain a few positions, especially in Google. But after a short period of making no further changes the site would fall away again. However, by introducing more content this would have the positive impact of restoring it to its former higher ranking.
This is more than a coincidence, we have been tracking similar results for several years. From what we can work out the frequency of news depends on the "space" you are in. If you are a news portal then you will be expected to produce content several times a day for your visitors. However, for search engine optimisation purposes and the majority of websites it would appear, there is a need to have between 2-5 contributions per week in order to benefit from this aspect of optimisation.
The most critical element is to ensure that what you produce is unique, original and in theme with the rest of the site. The content must archive into a well organised and easily accessible area, and sit on the same domain or subdomain. Also using an abbreviated summary area on the domain homepage appears to have a beneficial impact, although at this time we don't have conclusive proof.
Before you go out and build a blog or news area, bear in mind that we are only talking a couple of positions on a site that is already in the top ten for its target phrase. The basics of SEO; page optimisation, link building, article syndication etc still apply. But when you get close to the top (somewhere in the top 10) why not try adding content to the site regularly to scrape those extra couple of positions.
One last piece of advice however, be careful not to drop into the all too frequent trap. You start producing news or blog content, and within 3 to 9 months stop because either you have run out of things to say, or have just got bored with it. There is nothing worse from a visitor's point of view than seeing a site with old out-of-date news.
Like a pet "blogging is for life, not just for Christmas"
SMx Conference Update
If you are in London around the 15th or 16th of November why not visit the new SMx Search Engine Conference being run by Danny Sulivan and Chris Sherman. The conference will host a large number of Search Experts speaking on various subjects. I'll be speaking at the Diagnosing Search Problems panel...do pop in and say hi.
Update to Free Tutorials
If you have used our FREE SEO tutorials in the past, we hope you found them useful and many thanks for the feedback. The updated tutorials (announced last month) bring even more new tools and try to explain in greater detail how SEO is done properly,
and yes they are still FREE to read...
Don't forget you can access the Search Engine News blog online, giving more up-to-the-minute news and views in the world of search and Internet marketing.
Interesting fact ...
"Did you know, using session ID's to track your visitors can confuse search engines by showing duplicate content on different urls?"
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