One of the most important things a webmaster can do as far as SEO goes, is to include an area of the website designed for regular, fresh content. This can take many forms, for some websites a blog is the way to go, for others a news section is more suited to the nature of the business. Whatever it’s called, the main benefits as far as SEO goes are the same.

Below I want to talk about the importance of indexable content and why having regular updates on your website can help increase your online visibility. This is slightly different to the business side of things and more specifically about how a blog can have aid SEO practices.

Once the website is optimised on page, the focus moves towards link building. Links are hard to come by these days and they are immensly valuable when it comes to rankings. One of the best ways to get links to your website is by utilising your blog/news section. People don’t tend to link to business pages – by this I mean no one will really be linking to your pages that are specifically relevant to your business, an about page for example. People tend to link to things they find interesting or things that are useful, things that probably wouldn’t be found on your main website.

The blog however gives you a place where opinions can be expressed, more topical matters can be discussed and link worth posts can be placed. You can use it to show your expertise, or your involvement in your specific market. Keep it regular and up to date, so your readers know they will have something to get back to.

Blogs or news sections can be used for link baiting purposes. Link baiting is the process of creating content that is designed to attract links, and there are so many different options for people who want to create link bait, no matter what market they are working in. Without a blog this content has no where to go. This can be the difference between an alright SEO campaign and an exceptional SEO campaign.

The importance of a blog or news section on the website is undeniable. Without one you can really slow down an online marketing campaign.

It’s been covered a lot for quite some time, but site speed has now officially become one of the factors of Google’s algorithm. The idea is that google wants to provide users with the best experience possible, and the speed at which a website loads is one of the things that influences this. In order to keep users happy, Google will use the speed at which a website loads to determine it’s position in the search engine results.

This doesn’t mean that site speed will be a major factor in where a website ranks. It’s well known that Google’s algorithm contains over 200 different factors, with differing importance on each. What this means is that if two pages were to match up exactly on all the other factors, the quicker one would generally rank higher. The importance of site speed in the algorithm has not been revealed but it is certainly something to consider if you want your website to be as optimised as possible.

Thankfully there are a lot of tools out there that can make diagnosing any issues with site speed that much easier. If you want to learn a bit more about how to improve your site speed you can check out this post on site speed at Weboptimist.

Google has also been a bit fan of keeping the homepage minimalist, which is why it came as such a shock to users to find that last week it started to automatically apply a background picture to the homepage.

Having raised numerous complaints about the feature Google has since stopped these images from automatically appearing and instead offers users the option to manually set a background image. The move is seen by many as a way of keeping users that may otherwise start using Bing due to the visual impact it has.

WHatever the reason, Google’s hompage is becoming more and more cluttered with the additional feautures, and although it may still look quite bare it’s moving away from the minimalist feel it’s kept for so long.