What do you want your website content to do for your business? You probably want to attract the attention of search engines, to raise your online profile and to gain potential clients’ confidence in your business. One way you can help achieve all of these goals is to include a ‘News’ section on your website.

The most efficient news sections are designed to be quickly updatable and usually keep news items to 250 or so words, an ideal length for attracting Internet readers. This can always link to a longer article on your company blog if you feel there is more to say. However, if you do create longer versions, ensure they have a purpose. As with all web content, news items and associated articles should be kept clear and concise. Use exactly as many words as you need - not a single letter more. A regular schedule of fresh content means your site will be crawled more often by the search engines.

A frequently updated website also sends a strong signal to potential customers that you are an active and dynamic company. It gives them an insight into your aims, achievements and work in the current market that product descriptions and static pages can’t achieve. To this end, consider a variety of news posts on a variety of topics. Types of posts may include articles on product and company news (upgrades, promotions, recent press coverage); as well as wider industry news.

Online news sections can work really well in tandem with business blogs: the former can demonstrate your organisation’s leadership in its industry, whereas the latter offers a more informal platform for potential customers to interact.

“Googling” may have become a verb in its own right, but that isn’t stopping other search engines from trying to steal the Internet giant’s crown.

Yahoo and Microsoft, which handle 20.4% and 8.2% of all Internet search queries respectively, are both on the cusp of unveiling new technology that will enable their results to be displayed in relevant groups rather than a list of links. Microsoft’s new search engine is rumoured to be called Bing, and will replace the current search engine Live. Not much is known about Bing yet, although Chief Executive Steve Ballmer is due to speak at the All Things Digital conference later today, so he may soon reveal more. A search for “web copy writer London” (we’re sticking with the industry we know!) via Bing may display information about how to write for the web, alongside details of copy writers local to London, and web copywriting blogs. Such a search on Live.com currently generates a list of links related to copy writing – some relevant, some not - that users have to go through individually in order to find what they’re looking for.

Yahoo’s strategy is similar: the company aims to display images and answers from databases instead of a series of links. It is no surprise, then, that Yahoo and Microsoft are in talks to tackle Google by collaborating with each other on search. In fact, Sandeep Aggarwal, senior Internet research analyst with Collins Stewart LLC, thinks there will be a Microsoft-Yahoo search deal by the time the companies report their quarterly results in late July.

If competing search engines think Google is resting on its laurels, however, they could be in for a shock. New improvements are being made to the Google Suggest tool which was recently introduced to give users more control over their search results. Suggestions will now be provided when users make additional search queries from results pages whereas previously they were only offered when making a query from the Google homepage. Relevant past searches will be displayed when users have web history enabled, so they can repeat some of the searches they carry out most frequently. Sponsored links will also appear in the list of suggestions, which could help companies who want to target users most interested in their products and services with search engine marketing and pay per click ads.