I have written many times before that the best practice when writing new articles for your site it to write for your human visitors.
So many website owners these days are putting articles on their site that are stuffed with “keywords” looking to be found on the search engines. They don’t realize that if the page doesn’t make much sense to the people who are reading it they won’t stay.
The results are, if they are lucky enough to gt their page ranked well in the search engines, the real target of their effort (people) just stop by and leave right away. However, the odds are they won’t get very high in the search rankings either because no one is going to link to them and inbound links are the main factor in doing well in search.
So what will do well? I tell my customers to write what they know and target at the human visitors. You should pick out your search key words and place them in the title, then write your page. After you’re done look back and see if you can put your keywords into the text another time or two and still have it sound natural. I advise that you read it out loud. If it sounds spammy it probably is.
Google is on a quest this year and will have about 500 improvements to their search algorithm to eliminate or devalue spammy pages, not just their much talked about Panda update. They had a great post recently that I recommend called:
One of the things I try to constantly pay attention is security. Especially website security.
it’s very important that you keep the programs running on your site up to date. Ones like WordPress and their plugins are constantly updating and they make it really easy to install the upgrades. usually with one click.
What about some of the other forms and scripts you have on your site. Have an email contact form? Perhaps a script that lets your visitors print your page or recommend your site to someone else?
It’s not unusual for a website owner have these forms installed, maybe by a website designer and then forget about them. Let me assure you that while your site may have stayed the same, hackers never rest and they are always looking for their next target.
There’s plenty of help for webmasters out there and some of the best if direct from Google and it’s free. if you are not subscribed to their Webmaster Central Blog yet you should be. They had a really good post on security yesterday and i recommend it.
If you are thinking of building a new website or redesigning your old site this great post on speckyboy.com is definitely worth reading.
When starting a new site I try to ask my prospective client not just, how do you want your site to look, but what do you want your site to do? That’s important because most visitors don’t just want to see your brochure any more and maybe more importantly the search engines don’t either.
