Creative Connections

So far we have looked a number of what are known as ‘on page SEO techniques’ that are all instrumental in helping to achieve the best possible rankings for your web pages. So now it is time to look at the actual content.

Duplicate Content

To achieve the best possible ranking it is essential that you ensure that the content on your pages is original and not simply copied from elsewhere on the web. Apart from infringing copyright, the search engines are very good at identifying duplicate content, right down to a short phrase or sentence. What is also interesting to note, is that the search engines are also very good (not 100%) at establishing the origin of the duplicate content and ranking accordingly.

You will not normally be penalised for having duplicate content, it just will not help with your ranking and you need to be maximising every opportunity to improve your rank (remember the grains of sand? If not, see our earlier blog - Starting the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Journey).

If you have content that you syndicate out to dealers for promotion of products etc... , you may want to consider asking them to link back to your site as the originating source or you could have an agreement with them that they will use the meta name “robots” tag (content="noindex, follow")on pages where the duplicate content will show.  Follow this link For an explanation of the ‘robots’ meta tag.

For further reading on duplicate content see this very useful article from Goolgle.

Fresh Content

Search engines love fresh content, so even after you have applied all the best SEO techniques and written your SEO content, you must keep your site fresh. This may seem difficult for some sites where the information is static, if that is the case, consider a blog or “ latest news” page.

Update as regularly as possible, look at what your competitors are doing, review your site frequently and strive to make your web site the most appealing to users. The search engines will notice the effort and adjust your rankings accordingly.