Imagine stumbling upon the world’s greatest cafe, one filled with the most delicious coffee and pastries you’ve ever tasted. Now imagine that after your first visit, the doors remained shut every time you went for a visit — or worse, the cafe simply dropped off the map, eventually to be forgotten.
That’s what happens to your site if its content remains static. When sites launch, Google’s spiders crawl through the code and index it properly. But when nothing changes, the spiders stop visiting. There’s no reason to, after all, and Google assumes that you are closed for business.
If you don’t take content creation seriously on your site, its doors are essentially shut down to foot traffic. Without paths for the public to find you, they simply won’t go there. That’s why content creation is absolutely important for SEO.
When it comes to content creation, here’s the simple way to think about it: more is better. That doesn’t mean that you should pump out unrelated or filler content (Google’s algorithm is smart enough to determine content relevance). However, regular site updates with blog posts, articles, and new content signals Google to come by, check out your site, and re-index its contents. The more often that Google’s spiders come by, the better Google regards your site.
In addition to inviting Google over to take a look, each new bit of content will naturally be indexed for keywords. This process increases your overall search footprint, so the more pages you have, the bigger the keyword possibilities, all leading to increased traffic levels.
That’s what happens when you publish new content, but there’s a more hands-on approach that can gain further traffic. Social media provides two great opportunities for traffic generation. The first comes from generating clicks directly off of shared links. The second part comes more indirectly. It turns out that Google likes links from social media quite a bit — so much so that they’re given extra weight when determining search engine results. Of course, this may change when Google updates its algorithm again, but for now, social media is given priority.
Now that you know why content creation is so important, let’s take a look at just how to get it done. The sensible thing is to have a website with a content management system so that pages and blog posts can easily be created. When writing that content, be sure to use any desired keywords in the headline and in the content body. Stacking keywords at the expense of readability is a bad idea, but a reasonable density gets the point across while tipping the Google scales in your favor.
Of course, content creation does take time and effort, but the result is well worth it. So roll up those sleeves and consider all of the different things you could write about in relation to your business. After all, what good is having the world’s greatest anything — coffee shop or otherwise — if no one can find it?
Content creation is key to any website’s success, but not every business has the time to write regular posts and articles. Need help creating new content on a regular basis? Get your site noticed with new content by contacting Forward Push Media about our content creation services.
By Marc Apple
