Twiststl

So you want to start a company blog.  Great! Now how do you get people to actually read it?  With a winning combination of quality content and a few simple search engine optimization techniques, you'll be driving traffic to your blog and company's website in no time.  And those readers may soon become buyers.

Lost your page rank, but don't know why?  It may be due to Google's latest algorithm tweak. 

In an attempt to reduce the rubbish, Google has recently rolled out a new algorithm to provide more relevant results and a better user experience.  The update was designed to kick up the rankings of sites with original and unique content, in the form of research, in-depth reports, and thoughtful analysis.

Google also aimed to reduce search engine rankings of sites which were deemed "low-quality" (also known as "content farms").  These content farms offered little value to users as they copied content from other sites or provided (simply put) useless information.  By publishing tons of "empty" content with popular keywords, content farms were able to drive up their search engine ranking to boost site visits and effectively increase ad revenue.  Google estimates that the new algorithmic change will noticeably impact 11.8% of search queries, hopefully weeding out the majority of so-called content farms. 

So what does this mean going forward?  While it may be a little too early in the game to fully understand the effects of the new algorithm, one fact remains true: (quality) content is king.  More than ever, creating original and meaningful content is the key to winning the page rank game!

Search engine optimization - sounds complicated and costly and like something you probably don't want to mess with unless you're a trained tech-geek, right?  Well... not quite.  Search engine optimization (or SEO, for short) is the process of improving the volume of traffic to a web site from search engines like Google or Bing.  In short - the higher up your website appears in a random keyword search, the more likely you are to have people clicking on it, perusing it, and ultimately driving business to you from themselves and their friends.