Good looks vs a great personality
You are out for Friday night drinks at your favourite weekend cave and your eyes get caught by a stunning monster on the other side of the bar. Spotlight on, the rest of the cave and your mates don’t exist anymore. She is beautiful; her yellow spiky hair, black eyes and beautiful teethy-smile is simply breathtaking. You make your way over, introduce yourself and begin spending time with her to getting to know her better. Over the next few weeks this monster’s beautiful looks begin to fade; you discover her true personality which is a little odd and it turns out that she is a very unkind person. Ughh, what now? You suddenly find yourself looking for excuses why you can’t see her as much anymore and eventually the relationship fades away. *
*Note: this story is 100% ficticious; Hugo and Daphne remain in a happy long-term relationship and are the happiest monsters you will ever meet.
Believe it or not, websites are much the same!
While a beautiful website will get lots of attention, it more importantly needs to have a great personality, or in website terms – quality content. Just like a relationship this will help to develop a strong bond of trust and confidence. Providing quality information that your viewers are looking for will help to convert your viewers into enquiries and encourage them to visit your website again and again.
But here is the catch, customers are not the only ones reading your website. Google is watching you too. We know the importance of having a presence on page 1 of Google, so how does Google determine whether or not to display your website on page 1? The answer is Robots.
Did you know, your website needs to be robot-friendly?
I am not kidding, Google sends out Robots to check out every page on the internet, every day. Those robots help Google to stay omniscient and to bring up the most relevant websites when you type in your search query. Bots, short for robots, “read” your page just like we do, to understand what your page is about. But of course, robots do not speak our language, or see pretty pictures. They are the masters of efficiency or as I like to call it laziness. They want you to make it as easy as possible to understand what your website is about. This is where SEO (search engine optimisation) comes into play. SEO is the language that robots speak. SEO is hidden right throughout your website pages and the bots know where to look to find it without having to read all the content.
Be nice to Google and you will be rewarded
Google has become the one and only search engine on the market. When you need to find something or to look something up, you’ll tell your mate to “Google it”. Google makes our lives so much easier and has great opportunities for business owners. The secret is: the nicer you are to Google, the nicer Google will be to you.
If you make it easy for Google’s bots to find out what your page is about, your website will pop up on the first page of Google searches for relevant search queries. This is called your “page rank” for a certain keyword. If you make it hard for Google’s little helpers to figure out what your page is about, the bots won’t be happy and your website could end up on page 17 where no one will ever find it.
Great personality pays off
My message is very simple and clear to understand: keeping your page up to Google’s best practice recommendations pays off. By updating content on your website regularly, you will meet a very important requirement (among many others). Google will reward you for the work you put into your website and rank you in a higher position for relevant search results. This is called organic ranking and is completely free, it simply requires good quality content.
Next month Hugo and I will be blogging about AdWords – so stay tuned to discover how Google AdWords works
Contact Monster for a free quality website check here.
