Small Buisness Web Sites

All websites, regardless of whether they are for large companies or small businesses should always have a set of objectives. They should have a strategy for achieving those objectives. The objective should be geared towards whatever it is that they’re trying to achieve with the website. It should support your objectives to increase sales or to drive business to the company.

One area the web developer should pay particular attention to is the quality of the content, the freshness of the content, and the ability for the search engines to index their content.

We have all encountered websites where the content is almost next to useless. These have been written just to obtain search engine results. But they do not offer anything to the consumer or anyone searching on the Internet for a particular topic.

The search engines are trying to de-index these websites and this is the main reason why a website should have excellent content and why the content should be kept fresh.

Old content can quickly become out of date and as far as the search engines are concerned will be given a lower index rating as a result. In addition, if this content is about your products or services, business owners will want to ensure that the content is kept up-to-date and currently reflects the services and products that you offer.

We have developed the following strategy for keeping our content up-to-date on our own websites. Our websites are principally aimed at providing information to the consumer and therefore we recognize the value of that content is kept up-to-date and accurately reflecting current issues as well as information that consumers are looking for. Here’s our strategy.

Small Business Website Strategy – New Content

Depending on the subject of the website and reader interest, new content will be added at least twice a month and in some cases once a week to provide readers with new information about the subjects they are interested in. This also tells the search engines that new content is available to be indexed for consumers conducting searches on these particular topics on a regular basis.

Update Content

Older content should be reviewed and updated on regular basis to keep it current and fresh. There are several ways to do this. Our decision has been to focus on older content that is short duration. We also focus on older content that has not been touched for some time.

Posts are sorted based on size from smallest to largest. The smallest post is updated by adding more content. We increase it in size compared to the next smallest post. On average our posts will become larger overtime. At the same time, all punctuation and grammatical errors are corrected.

Tweak Content

Some of our posts already pretty good and just need to be updated. We want to show that they are still current to the search engine crawlers that crawl websites every second of every minute of every day. All posts are sorted based on the last time that they were updated. We then update the oldest post. We may add a few comments or improve the content of the post in some manner.

All of this work is aimed at keeping our website current. We are following these steps typically once a week or once every two weeks depending on the website.

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