Steps to Improve Your Website Content for Google

Forget PageRank for the Moment and Get Going on Your Content!

One of the hardest parts of optimizing your content for search engines is knowing if your changes have helped because it can take weeks for your site to be crawled and indexed. Luckily, after a month or so, the Googlebot will start coming back to your site every week or more often if you are constantly updating your site and everything is configured properly.

Waiting to see if your changes actually improved your location in the search results, or hurt them, is a drag. This is why so many people find a trial and error approach to SEO and content improvement to be frustrating and very time consuming. For this reason, it is very important to know what you are doing so you don't waste months and still have a website that never shows up on Google and is essentially invisible to your potential users / customers.

Step by Step SEO Content Improvement

1. Learn about SEO

Getting informed and educated about SEO and all that it entails is the first step. After you learn a little bit about search engine optimization, it will become clear that there really is no magic. Common sense and understanding the rules of the game will help you to start feeling more comfortable about the process. There is a caveat, however, in this game the rules are always changing and so if you are getting first page results for some of your keywords today, you may need to frequently monitor Google and make adjustments to your site and content to stay in that position.

2. Get to Know Your Competitors

You will almost certainly be fighting with several competitors for the top Google spots for your keywords. Take a look at their sites and determine why they are beating you out or pushing you off of the first page results. Try to understand the services that they are offering and how they are presenting the information. It might just be that your competitors' sites have been around longer and have lots of links on other sites, but it could be that the way they have designed their web pages and written their content is helping them show up higher in the organic search results.

3. Make SEO Improvements

Once you understand what improvements need to be made, implementing the changes on your website pages is usually straighforward, but sometime tedious. Doing the work is not always the hardest part, it is knowing what needs to be done that presents a challenge. Learn more about what kind of content Google likes and doesn't like.

If you come across some Google hacks, tricks, or back-doors during you SEO research, I strongly suggest that you do not attempt to take advantage of them. If you do something that Google really disapproves of, they will not hesitate to ban your site from their index. See what Google has to say about what content is acceptable and how to make a Google friendly website.

Dont worry, I get into the specific Google SEO content improvements in the next few articles, geographical keywording, the role of your page title, and the topic of your page which expand upon the very general advice that Google provides us.

4. Verify with SEO Tools

Now that you have tweeked your site, or in some unfortunate cases, gutted it and rebuilt it, it is time verify your work. Check your changes by using SEO analysis tools that can quickly measure keyword density and other tangible aspects affecting your rank or friendliness to crawlers and search engines. Use a variety of tools that measure different things. Don't put all of your faith in one tool, get a second opinion by validating your site's search optimization with several tools even if they claim to do the same thing.

5. Wait to Get Crawled

After making changes to your site you should expect to wait a few days or a week for the Googlebot to come back. Use this time to create new pages and get some fresh content on your site. You can also do some blogging and try to get the word out about your site - but be careful and respectful, if you are blatantly posting links to your site, and if the site doesn't really have much content yet, then you might get a harsh response from the members of the blog.

If you have been working like crazy trying to produce lots of content and making it Google and SEO friendly, then maybe you should use the waiting time to take a break from it all - a few days off will give your brain a break and you will come back with renewed energy.

Don't second guess yourself and make changes again and again before you have been crawled and reindexed - doing this will not help you identify if your changes had any effect. Check your web statistics or logs to see when the last time the Googlebot came to your site. Once the Googlebot has been there it still takes some time for the results to actually start showing up on the Google search page.

6. Refine Your Technique and Strategy

Try to keep some notes or records of the changes that you have made so you can determine what kind of impact they had on your pages in the Google index. Compare the organic search performance and traffic of each of your pages to determine which techniques and stategies are working better than others. Identify areas that need improvement.

If you have several content optimization strategies that you want to test, try these approaches separately on several different pages and once you have been crawled, you can compare the ranking and performance of the various SEO techniques that you tried.

7. Getting Professional Help

If you have gone through this process a few times and still cannot get the results that you want, perhaps it is time to rethink your approach. Most website owners are running a business and are experts in their own field, but simply do not have the time and energy to become an expert in web design and search engine optimization. Ask yourself if you have the time to invest in SEO or if it is time to call in the pros. There are many professional website designers, copy writers, and search engine optimization experts out there that are willing to help. Consider the benefits that you stand to gain and how much you are willing to spend to improve your site's organic search performance on Google.