Say you have a small website that doesn’t really perform well in search engines. As I described earlier in my post called “Why a cheap $300 website will not work for you“, the best and easiest way to boost your search engine rankings is to add more quality content to your website. The more good content you put on and the more you promote it, the better will your website perform.
So what can you do to increase the amount of content on your website but still keep it compact and easy to use?
Here are a few tips:
1. Add a blog
Adding a blog to your website is a single, most effective way to generate fresh, quality content (see my post “10 reasons why you should start a business blog” to see the full benefits of business blogging). Blog is an easy, cost effective way to get your business visible at the top when people search for your keywords. Search engines love blogs because they offer a large amount of text content that is updated and added to on a regular basis. Because your posts are relevant to your field, you are generating invaluable content filled with the right keywords you need to rank high in searches, just by posting articles.
2. Use drop down menus in navigation
Adding new pages to your web site is great, but make sure you keep your navigation easy to use. Add a drop down menus to your main menu to logically separate the content. Drop down menus work best with horizontal menu bar. You can spread the content to more than one level too. If the layout is logical you can easily have three level drop down menu without confusing your visitors.
3. Use in-text links to offer more information
Not every page on your website needs a link in the main menu. You can easily use only links in your text to link to pages with more detailed information. Use your main menu to link to the important pages and place a link to the less important pages inside the page text. This way you keep your site clean, informative and easy to use.
4. Include “Search” function on your website.
It is important to make your website as user friendly as possible. An essential feature for any website with more than 8 pages is a search function. Search is an easy way for your visitors to find exactly what they need.
If your website is build on a solid content management system, chances are it has a search feature support already built in. Otherwise it is easy to add Google Search button to your website with few lines of code.
5. Use sidebars to publish small blocks of text
You can use the top and side areas of the website to present extra content. For example interesting facts and statistics, latest offers, news, external links – all of these are basically non essential content that you can display in the sidebar. It will give your visitors additional information in non-obtrusive subtle way.
6. Use tooltips to display additional information
If you would like to provide additional information for certain bits of text on your website, you can use special tooltip plugin to do so. Tooltips only show up when user hovers with mouse over the specified keyword which makes them nice and friendly way to display for example definitions or images.
These are just some of the things you can do to make your website perform better in search engines by adding new content while keeping it user friendly. If you do it right, you can add plenty of good content to your site without making it look too big or too confusing.
Of course there is more to SEO than just adding new content and I will try to cover more on this topic in the upcoming posts.
Have you seen any good ways of displaying additional content recently? If so, what did you like about it?
