The value of a website is at an all time high right now. For the longest time a company would pay a web designer thousands of dollars to create a website. The web designer would finish the project and hand over the website. The thought was okay I have my website now back to handling the business essentials for my company.

Updating and maintaining the website was simply not thought of to be an essential thing to spend time and money on. Why spend more time and money on it when you just paid thousands of dollars to get it created. This would cause the website to go untouched for months or maybe even years and still happens today. This certainly is being seen a lot less as we are starting to see more people focus on maintaining and updating their website.

This is because awareness has been raised about how important it is to maintain and update your website as much as possible. The search engines have also played a big role in this with their search rankings, putting the most relevant websites at the top of the search engines. This causes the websites that go untouched and unmaintained to fall in the search engine rankings every day.

The search engines update their analytic s frequently, requiring websites to stay up to date and producing new content. Website owners are realizing this and becoming more determined to get their website to the first page of Google and other search engines.

 

Luckily there are things you can do to improve your ranking in the search engine but you have to first understand that it’s going to require time and work.

When starting anything in life it’s always good to do some research first. This bodes true for improving your website as well. Finding out what your competitors are doing is a great way to start. How often they publish blogs, what social media they are on, how their website looks. This will help you get started in the right direction and could spark some ideas.

It is also important to find out good keywords to use in your niche. Using good focus keywords helps to get noticed by the search engine bots. In the end you can never do enough reading and research because new things are always being discovered.

Besides providing contact information so people can easily get in touch with you, the most important thing to a website is its content. Content is what fuels a website. Having new content is how to keep your website up to date and relevant.

 

Keeping a website relevant means providing a good amount of content that also has originality and quality. By researching the competition you find out how often they are publishing new content. So if the goal is to get above them in the search engines, then you will want to be publishing more content then them.

Some things to focus on when creating quality content is relevance, the title, key words, post length, images, and originality to an article. Focusing on these things is a great way to creating quality content.

Consistency starts to become a factor once the content starts getting published. Reaching the top page in the search engines is something that doesn’t happen overnight, it takes time. With time comes consistency. So having enough content for a long period of time becomes essential. If a website publishes a lot of content right off the bat and then doesn’t post anything for awhile, you will not see much of an increase, if any.

As I have said before and I will say it over and over again, this takes time. Yes this can become tiring but just remember that your competitors are feeling the same way. Outlasting them gives you a high chance to rise above them in the rankings.

In the end you just have to keep up with the times, meaning just having a website simply is not getting the job done anymore. Google does try to make it tough by consistently changing algorithms but if you stick to you plan and continue to publish good original content you will see higher rankings and an increase in traffic.

Based in Rochester, New York, Netsville is an Internet Property Management company specializing in managing the Digital Marketing, Technical, and Business Solutions for our customers since 1994. For more information, please click here.