When it comes to creating content for your blog or website, there are some obvious rules to follow, but most of these deal with layout, format, and structure. Of course you want engaging articles, catchy headlines, menus that visitors can use to smoothly navigate your site, and everything organized in a way that makes sense.

But content is the reason people visit blogs and other websites. Whether your site features news, political musings, sports stories, recipes, movie reviews, or letters to the troops, the content is the reason people visit. If it’s any good, they’ll stay.

This is where it gets a little fuzzy because there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to what types of content you should feature.  There is a tricky balance between appeasing your current audience and attracting more readers to join that audience.
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When it comes to search engines, there are lots of them. However, many of us are only familiar with the main search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.  However it doesn’t end there, search engines can cover everything on any interest. Today  we’re going to look at 3 fantastic search engines that hardly anybody knows about.

Wolfram|Alpha is not your typical search engine. In fact, it’s not really a search engine at all.  It’s what they call a computational search engine. In other words, instead of finding you a site with the information you seek, it will compute the information you seek. For example, what phase of the moon is on your anniversary? Or what day of the week were you actually born on? These are the types of questions that Wolfram loves to answer. Eventually, Wolfram says it wants to have all computable knowledge on their site.
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When it comes to SEO and in fact most forms of online marketing, Google is really where this all ends and begins. In fact it is fair to say that most people probably don’t really practice SEO so much as GO – not search engine optimization, but Google optimization. When was the last time you checked your ranking on Yahoo or Bing!? (Enjoyable punctuation there…)

The point is that Google dictates whether you make money or not, and your success will largely rest with Google. But does that make the search giant your friend? Or your enemy? A boss? Or a collaborator?

The Evidence

Let’s start by looking at the evidence. On the one hand you could look at Google as a collaborator and as a friend. Google constantly keeps us up to date with the changes it is making to its search algorithms and though it may not go so far as to tell us precisely how to get to the number one spot, they do generally give us warning before they make some kind of major change.

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If you’re a local business owner who has a website already created for your business, it’s important for the website to be laid out appropriately so it gets a person’s attention and makes them want to continue reading the content on the website. This includes making sure you have the relevant information on your main page that people are expecting to find when first visiting your local business website.

Does your homepage clearly provide information about who you are and what you do?

People expect to find exactly what it is they were searching for in the first place when they arrive on your homepage. They don’t want to find irrelevant info that wasn’t within their search request. Point being, people need to know exactly what your local business website is all about within only a few second upon arriving and reading. What’s even more important is each person visiting the site should know what services and products your business provides without having to dig for the information.
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