Content is King

Let’s get this clear. Writing content is a profession. We build websites, not content. Can everyone paint a wall? Most of us can but you will see the difference compared with a professional. On top of that, the professional painter is probably a lot quicker and uses less material. Same with content writers. They know how to write attractive articles and to use the right words.

If you are new to creating content for your website, rely on your abilities. Where would your business / services be if you didn’t started it? Exactly, just start, google some around and let others read your content. By the time you have more insight who is visiting your site and which pages are attractive, you can start updating.

Or…. just try using ChatGPT

SEO is not the same as writing content, it is anticipating on the outcome of Google’s alghoritms.

Shown at the top of the first page of search results is what everyone is endeavouring for.

There are two ways to get ranked high:

1. pay Google
2. understand SEO

SEO specialists have been trained for years and need constant training to keep up to date with the search alghoritms that Google constantly updates. Now why would you do that? High rankings means traffic, traffic leads to conversion and conversion is money. The more people that come to your website, the more chance you have to sell your product. It is that simple. The only reason for SEO being complicated is that computers do not understand words. Humans can understand words because they learned to give it a meaning (an association). Call a baby a few terrible names and it will smile back at you because it has not learned to associate that with negativity.

“People tend to think of communication as an exchange of linguistic signs or gestures, forgetting that much of communication is about the social context, about who you are communicating with,” – Arjen Stolk (Dutch postdoctoral fellow University of California). This is where Google jumped in. Analyzing words, looking for context and matching it with the search profile someone builds up. Around the clock, Google robots scan all websites analyzing words and looking for patterns which are saved in their database. Once you entered your search words or sentence, Google matches that with the patterns they stored in their databases.

That by the way, is a great source to learn what matches with words you are using.

Now imagine your (new) website is running for a while and you don’t have a clue how many visitors have come to your website, from where, clicking what page for how long? Would that not be like wearing your best cloths without going anywhere? A shocking 50% of the websites on the internet do not have analytics. There are probably reasons for that but why would you invest (money and time) on a website without knowing How it performs?

Google Analytics is free and configured on your website in two clicks. A ready made dashboard can be taken from their gallery and you are ready to go. There is only one real reason you should not use Google Analytics. It will disappoint you once you see the real traffic.

Get over it, start thinking like a visitor, improve some content and WOW, something is happening and it has become addictive to improve your results.

Visitors of your website will instantly see when it is outdated and will disengage, unless the website is about vintage

Keeping your website up to date should be a natural process like cleaning your house.

This does not necessarily means that you have to throw away old content, you can re-use it and deleting pages from your website can have serious impact on your ranking if not properly managed. Proper deleting a page without redirecting the indexed URL creates a 404 page not found and that is bad news for the visitor looking for that page and also for the Google robot trying to find that page. You will get penalized by Google.

Some interesting tips here.