Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have placed an increased importance on unique content in their site ranking algorithms.

Updates with a better search experience in mind have been made to various algorithms that Google uses to determine where pages rank. Google has shifted focus to quality content that is focused on relevant terms. Businesses who have deployed well-intentioned content marketing strategies have benefited from this switch seen the value of their SEO stock rise.

Search engines favor sites that have unique content and sections that are updated regularly. Being able to produce targeted content aimed at keywords that are important to your business is essential to maintaining any rank in the search engine results pages. Now, SEO and Content Marketing work together in a way that allows businesses of all types to gain traction in the search rankings and find new customers fast.

Importance of Unique Content

Having great content that you can call your own will help establish your business as a resource in your particular field.  We call this becoming a “content authority” on your subject matter, and it’s what everyone wants to be.

Search engines love sites that have something valuable and different to offer the world. Displaying a page with content created to specifically answer a user’s query is critical in establishing an authoritative identity. This can go a long way in determining whether you show up at the top of search results to the terms that matter most to you.

The Best Ways to Keep Your Site Updated

There are a number of different ways to keep your site updated in order to be delivering content that is fresh. Search engines prefer giving users up-to-date information and making regular updates is the perfect way to keep your site from becoming static.

Information displayed on pages on your site must always be edited whenever there is a change. Making new pages with unique content to announce a new promotion or event is another way to make sure a site is being updated frequently.

One of the most popular ways to regularly update a site is posting to the site’s blog. Blog posts allow for a number of different forms of media to be used in a way that can attract new users to your site. Staying up to date with important industry news in your field and then posting about it can be a great way to keep your site relevant and appear in the most relevant queries.

BWG’s SEO Process

Boston Web Group can handle every step of the SEO/Content Creation process. Keeping your site updated with unique content is vital for businesses who wish to maintain a commanding online presence.

We understand the importance of putting together a comprehensive content marketing strategy to make sure all content produced has a purpose. Regular updates can also be made to existing posts and pages when an edit is necessary.

The content will be enhanced by technical optimizations that will allow your site to deliver optimized content to users more efficiently than ever. Our SEO expertise allows us to stucture each page so it is clearly labeled for relevant searches.

Contact us today to discuss your Content Strategy and Digital Marketing efforts.

Today someone asked how to make a worpdress post stay on the home page – to make it a “sticky” post.

First you would need to login to your WP-Admin Panel, and open up the post page. Look towards the right hand sidebar where you will see a Publish box. Look at the Visibility> Public> Stick this post to the front page field and click edit.

Check the box to make the post Sticky and publish it. If you want to make an older post stick to the front page, follow the same steps and remember – just click Publish when you’re done!

Recently, Yelp updated their algorithms for filtering user reviews on millions of businesses. This is a big move for Yelp, who is currently dealing with lawsuits for their practice of filtering legitimate reviews (as Spam) from legitimate customers and extorting businesses to pay them to display the reviews. This practice by Yelp is one of the reasons we do not typically recommend them over other review websites, such as Angie’s List. Along with the undisputable fact that almost every review we receive on Yelp gets filtered.

The new update to their website no longer labels reviews as “Filtered”, now they are “Not Recommended”. This seems just as bad, since they are now explicitly stating you should not listen to these reviews, even though many of them are still legitimate customers with good things to say. This is a nightmare for anyone trying to maintain a solid online reputation. We have been working on finding ways to get legitimate reviews to bypass the filter with little success.

Since it looks like Yelp is only going to continue its practice of picking and choosing which reviews are “Recommended”, we recommend beginning to build an online reputation elsewhere, such as Angies List or Google Places. More reviews in more places always means a better online presence and reputation.

Over the past month, some of you have been seeing some changes in Google’s search results to display much more relevant results. This is mainly due to the brand new algorithm Google has rolled out, known as “Hummingbird”, that has overhauled the old algorithm.  They actually released it before announcing it, and nobody notices; which is exactly what Google would prefer. Google periodically releases new versions of their algorithm to improve certain aspects, however this is the biggest change in over a decade. What does this mean for your website and SEO rank?

Alga who?

A search engine algorithm is a mathematical computation that provides the end user with relevant search data. In other words, its what makes the search engine show you “Joe’s Used Cars” when you search for “used cars Boston” in any search engine. Fundamentally, the way Hummingbird affected the google algo is by treating the entire search term as one relevant string. It’s trying to become more …human. Now, as opposed to breaking it up and analyzing each keyword, Google will take the search phrase “show me used cars in Boston” and give you a Map with pins from local dealerships, including Joe’s. So this update focuses on semantics – the natural way that human speech and normal questions are formed and presented.

What hummingbird changes

Write better, useful, thoughtful content – this update makes quality content take precedence over junk. Essentially, people need to start to write better content, use a number of synonyms to capture all the variations that google will associate, and discontinue writing content that is saturated with one keyword, or using “article spinning” services that recycle the same content.

The Hummingbird update means that search engine optimization experts need to start finding new ways of measuring keyword usage rates, since all Google searches are now encrypted making much of the keyword data unavailable.  You may have noticed this when looking at your google analytics organic keyword data, and seeing “not provided” in the area that is supposed to show the exact keyword. Since keyword searches are more becoming encrypted, this means that a websites’ search engine rank is more heavily influenced by quality content.  This does not mean keywords are no longer relevant in the equation, but there is a higher focus on the quality of content a website contains.  If you have not recently evaluated your website content for quality, now is a better time than ever to do so.

What you can do

Keyword strategies should also now be revisited and revised periodically, to ensure the effort is being put into effective keywords that are going to get you ranked.  Competitive analysis is going to be a critical step in choosing quality keywords to list you in local search results. Is time for you to revisit your SEO strategy? Do you need expert advice about your current strategy? You should consult Boston Web Group today about our Search Engine Optimization packages.