Top 3 Ways to Stay Relevant to Search Engines

Below we examine three of the top ways to gain recognition from search engines. None of these will make you an overnight success, but they will certainly put you on the path to being top of search engines every time.

It's important to keep in mind that these ideas are just for on-site techniques and not for the back end (meta tags, descriptions, etc) or off-site (backlinking, etc)

1. Consistently Updated Original Content

A blog is the most popular example of the type of original content that you can use to keep your site constantly updated. Search engines love to see that a website is constantly being updated with new content and is staying relevant. This doesn't mean that you need to post once a day, 7 days a week. This means that if you update your blog once a week, then that's sufficient enough to show the search engines that your site is relevant.

Make sure it is original content though. It's totally fine to link out or quote from other articles, but the content must be originally written by YOU. Even if you change a few words around, search engines know and you can be penalized for that.

Search engines are cracking down more and more on people who simply copy & paste other people's content onto their site.

The length of the blog post doesn't necessarily matter either. You'll get a lot of arguments of people saying that you MUST write 1000+ words or else search engines won't even count it. But that's hog wash. Look at Seth Godin's blog, very short but relevant blog posts. The actual content of the blog shouldn't be determined by the word count; it should be written for your audience! If you can get your topic out in 100 words or less, more power to you!

Also, don't keyword stuff. Example (if my keyword is bacon):

Boy, I love bacon, bacon is one of those bacon goodness foods that I love because bacon is great and if bacon wasn't around then bacon wouldn't be great and bacon IS great so I'm glad that bacon is around.

That sentence is kind of ridiculous. Make it readable. You're not writing for search engines, you're writing for people.

2. Comments

If people leave comments on your blog, then that's a great indicator from search engines that people love your content. It's OK if you don't get a lot of comments or any comments for a while, but comments can be a great way to gain a bit more authority.

This isn't permission to leave comments under fake names and email addresses. This is simply saying that you should do the work to promote your content. The more interesting your content is and the more it's being shared throughout social spaces, and the more consistency you have with posting blogs, the more likely you'll get more & more comments.

3. Sharing News Articles

Some of the most popular sites in the world do nothing but share news articles from other people. It's OK to share news articles, just as long as you don't share the ENTIRE article. Take a look at our news section. You'll see that we copy a bit of the news, then we direct the reader to go to the original article. This is good SEO/content for us and for the original article.

This isn't as great as original content, but it's a good start. If all you have time for each week is to post up a news article on your website, that's better than nothing. And who knows, you may become THE news source for that particular subject. Normal people can't be everywhere on the internet at once so it's nice to be able to get our news about a particular subject from one source.

There you have it! In our opinion, these are the top three ways to gain recognition from the search engines.

Do you have anything else that works well?