By Darrell Cuthbert
 | Search engines, like the mighty Google, use a variety of signals to “score” each website page found online. This score will determine where in the results a website page will appear when a user searches for a particular keyword or key phrase. |
Google, Bing, Yahoo and other commonly-used search engines, cache, index and rank URLs*/web pages individually. Although each website has an overall score, the individual score of a page has a big influence on where it will appear in the rankings. As a result, some pages on a website may appear high in the rankings and others much lower down (or even not be ranked at all).
*(Universal Resource Locator – often also called the “website address”, e.g. http://www.yourcompanyname.co.za).
Many businesses, especially SMEs, have websites that consist of relatively few pages, for example:
This gives search engines only four URLs to find, cache, index and rank.
Having more URLs would give the search engines more to work with, but creating large amounts of static pages can be very time consuming and can clutter up the site navigation menu, making the site hard to use and possibly slowing down page load times.
So, what is the solution?
One of the simplest and most effective ways to add content-rich pages to a company website is via a built-in blog, or even multiple blogs. In many cases, these are simply labelled “blog”, but alternative names can also be used (and often are), e.g.:
Just because it’s not called a blog, doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t.
So, let’s assume a blog is added to the site – this automatically adds one more indexable URL, i.e. www.yourcompanyname.co.za/blog (or /news /articles, etc.).
Now we are up to five URLs.
Don’t stop there though. It’s time to add content to the blog. Original, useful, relevant information is best for blog posts.
I won’t go into what makes a good blog post or the benefits it can bring to your business here, that is covered elsewhere on this blog. For now we will stick to the impact of creating extra URLs.
If you blog weekly (the frequency I usually recommend to clients), after one year you will have 52 posts, all with great content for site visitors to read, enjoy and be informed by, and 52 new URLs for Google, and other search engines, to discover, analyse and add to their listings.
Assuming the quality of the information and writing is good enough, the bulk of these posts should rank well for their chosen target keywords, and hopefully for secondary keywords as well.
Now we have the original static page URLs, the blog header page, and a year’s worth of well-written blog posts;
4+1+52=57
57 Indexable URLs, all backed up by great content, properly placed and used keywords, and tight, well-written meta information.
Which do you think will help your company website more online exposure, 4 pages of indexed, ranked content, or 57?
Added Benefits
Not only does adding 52 blog posts in a year give your business website a better chance of ranking well, it also gives you 52 pieces of content to share on social media sites and to bookmark. This allows you to create a multitude of backlinks that point back at your company site – essentially forming a net to “catch” site visitors, and turn them into prospects and customers.
How that works, though, is a subject for another article on this blog – keep your eyes open for it.
*(Universal Resource Locator – often also called the “website address”, e.g. http://www.yourcompanyname.co.za).
Many businesses, especially SMEs, have websites that consist of relatively few pages, for example:
- Home (www.yourcompanyname.co.za)
- Products and Services (www.yourcompanyname.co.za/products_and_services)
- About (www.yourcompanyname.co.za/about_us)
- Contact (www.yourcompanyname.co.za/contact_us)
This gives search engines only four URLs to find, cache, index and rank.
Having more URLs would give the search engines more to work with, but creating large amounts of static pages can be very time consuming and can clutter up the site navigation menu, making the site hard to use and possibly slowing down page load times.
So, what is the solution?
One of the simplest and most effective ways to add content-rich pages to a company website is via a built-in blog, or even multiple blogs. In many cases, these are simply labelled “blog”, but alternative names can also be used (and often are), e.g.:
- Latest News
- Updates
- Articles
Just because it’s not called a blog, doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t.
So, let’s assume a blog is added to the site – this automatically adds one more indexable URL, i.e. www.yourcompanyname.co.za/blog (or /news /articles, etc.).
Now we are up to five URLs.
Don’t stop there though. It’s time to add content to the blog. Original, useful, relevant information is best for blog posts.
I won’t go into what makes a good blog post or the benefits it can bring to your business here, that is covered elsewhere on this blog. For now we will stick to the impact of creating extra URLs.
If you blog weekly (the frequency I usually recommend to clients), after one year you will have 52 posts, all with great content for site visitors to read, enjoy and be informed by, and 52 new URLs for Google, and other search engines, to discover, analyse and add to their listings.
Assuming the quality of the information and writing is good enough, the bulk of these posts should rank well for their chosen target keywords, and hopefully for secondary keywords as well.
Now we have the original static page URLs, the blog header page, and a year’s worth of well-written blog posts;
4+1+52=57
57 Indexable URLs, all backed up by great content, properly placed and used keywords, and tight, well-written meta information.
Which do you think will help your company website more online exposure, 4 pages of indexed, ranked content, or 57?
Added Benefits
Not only does adding 52 blog posts in a year give your business website a better chance of ranking well, it also gives you 52 pieces of content to share on social media sites and to bookmark. This allows you to create a multitude of backlinks that point back at your company site – essentially forming a net to “catch” site visitors, and turn them into prospects and customers.
How that works, though, is a subject for another article on this blog – keep your eyes open for it.
Are you struggling with keeping your company blog updated, or maybe you want to start a business blog, but have no idea where to get quality content to post?
A large portion of the work I do consists of ghost writing blog posts for businesses of all sizes, and in diverse industries.
Contact me now to discuss your blog content requirements.
A large portion of the work I do consists of ghost writing blog posts for businesses of all sizes, and in diverse industries.
Contact me now to discuss your blog content requirements.
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