You may have heard that SEO is all about including the right keywords in your website meta tags and content. You may have heard that optimizing a website consists of conducting keyword research, identifying the right keywords to represent your business, and implementing those keywords all over your pages. If you've heard these things, I'm sorry. While it's true that including keywords in your title tags is important, these steps are just the beginning of good SEO.
Search engines are designed to return the most relevant, valuable information to their users. The reason search engines crawl the web regularly is to update their indexes, to make sure the information they have is still the most relevant, valuable information available. What does this mean for your website? Put simply, it means you need to update your information, too.
If an important event occurs in your industry, you need to be the source for the most relevant, valuable information on that event. If a new product becomes available, you need to be the source of the most relevant, valuable information on that product. You get the idea. The information you need to cover will vary depending on your industry, your business goals, and your target market, but if you want to impress the search engines, regularly adding new information as it becomes available is critical.
Here's another way to look at it. Websites, by definition, are distribution platforms. Good websites are designed to publish media. Search engines seek out and reward websites that are actively publishing the most important media and making it readily available to visitors.
This is why most major news websites, like CNN, the BBC, and the New York Times, are ranked well in search engines. By definition, news websites are constantly uncovering the most relevant, valuable information on a wide variety of topics, crafting this information into meaningful, engaging, accessible media, and publishing it.
In a sense, your website needs to be a news website that covers a specific niche. This niche is defined by what your target market, your audience, needs to know or is looking for. The better you answer the questions and meet the needs of your target market via the media you create and publish on your site, the higher your site will rank in the search engines, all other factors being equal.
How to Do It
The easiest way to add new pages to your site is with a blog. When you write a blog post, you are creating a new page of content located at your web address, and over time, this makes your site larger and more authoritative in the eyes of Google. When this content is added on a regular basis, with timestamps, it lets Google know that you're still growing and that your site needs to be crawled over and over again, possibly as often as once or twice per day.
So, blog. It's easy, and it can make the difference between a site that is never found on Google and one that achieves top rankings over time.
Websites are not static like billboards or business cards. They aren't meant to be. Websites are meant to publish information. Update your site regularly with new pages of valuable, informative content to improve your SEO rank.
