18 January 2006
By - Deryck Harlick
So, you have built your website, populated it with content and it is optimised for search engines. That’s great. But now what?
Initially, once your site has been crawled by the search engines, you may see you ranking rise – over the next few months you should see it slowly making it way up the search engines. But then it stops. Over the next few months you might either see it stop where it is, or sometimes it might even begin to slip down the rankings again.
So how do you stop this from happening? Well, one of the indicators that many search engines use to rank your site is to look at how relevant and up-to-date the content is on it. If you never change, add to or up-date your content, then over time the search engines will see your site as out of date, or of less importance of a similar site which has been up dated more recently. This is where content management systems (sometimes known as CMS) come into their own.
If your site has a content management system enabled on it then put it to use. Make sure that any out-dated information is removed or modified periodically. If your company develops a new product or service, promote it! Not only will you be obviously making visitors aware of what you do but you will also be showing the search engines that this is a ‘living’ website that changes and is relevant.
Websites with constantly updated areas of content such as a news section, accessable from the homepage are a perfect example. If every month you published an article or press release then search engines are more likely to see your website as current and relevant – so you will score more points on their system and are more likely to rank higher.
A good content management system should allow you to update your website without the need to be a technical expert.They should be as easy to use as a standard word processor.
If your site does not have a content management system then don’t despair - you can easily have one integrated into your existing design or if your website is getting a bit long in the tooth then make sure when have a new site developed it includes a fully integrated CMS solution.
For more information on how Content Management Systems can not only help your web placement and search engine optimisation but also how it can help you to keep control of you online presence then please contact Deryck Harlick on 0191 211 1955