Web Traffic Content - Is Content Really King?
You have worked hard and long at building a Website---one that looks good, sounds good, feels good! You've made sure that each page gives the information people need to buy your product(s) or service(s). Now someone tells you that you need to add more content, and keep adding content! And you think, perhaps a little incredulously, "So just why should I add more to an already great site?"
There are several reasons for this. They have to do with first, your potential customers and second, the search engines. Let's look at both of these.
Imagine you are in a very large city, like New York or Los Angeles. You want to buy an iPod---the very best one that you can afford. You can make dozens of phone calls to the stores, which are scattered throughout the city, asking about their iPods, the benefits of each one, and the prices. Some of the folks you talk to are not very helpful, so you decided not to go to their stores, even though one is by far the closest of any, less than a mile away. The store that is the furthest away had a clerk that was by far the most helpful---he seemed to have infinite patience with all of your questions and, in fact, he even gave you a lot of information before you could ask a question. He was pleasant and courteous, was thorough in the information and gave it in a way you could grasp; he knew what he was talking about. Even though some of his prices were higher than other stores, you travel across the city to buy from this most helpful salesperson.
Your Website is your salesperson. You'll make few sales if you just put up a catalog with short item descriptions. You need to give your prospective customers all the information they want about your products or services. In fact, you want to give them even more! If you have the information they are looking for the first time they come to your site, they are more likely to return to your site a second time when they need information about something else you offer. If you were the Web store selling iPods and other portable media players, you would probably start out by listing the players you have available and giving descriptions of each, along with their pros and cons.
But don't stop there. Give them information about iPods and their copycats in general, even going into a little bit of their history. Give information about any glitches that folks run into with portable media players in general, and give them solutions for those glitches. Give them ideas about all of the ways they can use their players. Give them Web sites where they can download music. Give them simple to follow instructions. Give them a place where they can contribute their own ideas and information to your site. Keep them up-to-date on the news about these kinds of products.
Make sure it's easy for your potential customers to find the information on your Web site that they need and want. You want to develop repeat customers---the lifeblood of any business. A static Website is unlikely to do this.
Those are the main reasons for continually adding content for potential customers. The reasons for the search engines are really not all that different.
What is the job of a search engine? Basically it is to recognize what a Website or page is about and to determine how good it is. Once it decides how good it is, it can rank it with other Websites that are about the same thing.
At first, search engines pretty much looked for how often certain words occurred on a page, and where they were on the page. But as the Internet grew, so did the search engines. They altered the algorithms (mathematical formulas) they used to refine their searches and findings. Pretty soon the big engines, like Google and Yahoo!, were changing their algorithms so often that Webmasters could hardly keep up. The search engines were not making these changes just to frustrate Webmasters or keep them on their toes. They made them so they could offer more accurate results to their users and customers.
Yahoo! even tells us what they are looking for in a Website:
- Original and unique content of genuine value
- Pages designed primarily for humans, with Search Engine considerations secondary
- Hyperlinks intended to help people find interesting, related content, when applicable
- Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a Web page
- Good Web design in general
Yahoo! also makes the following comment: "Unfortunately, not all Web pages contain information that is valuable to a user. Some pages are created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results; this is often called "spam." Yahoo! does not want these pages in the index."
The search engines will spider your Website every time you add or change content (you do have to notify them that a change has been made). The more often they spider your site, the more likely you can move up in their ranks.
Besides content, they also look at the number of visitors you have had, how long they have stayed at your site, how many of your pages they looked at, and so on. The higher those numbers are, the higher you will be rated by the search engine. And those numbers rise with good, plentiful content on your Website.
So, pleasing your customers pleases the search engines. The more you please the search engines, the more potential customers will find your site, which---in turn---will please the search engines.
You just can't lose with lots of great, new content continually being added to your Website!
Thank you to Mary Lou Derksen for this "Web Traffic Content" article.
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