7 Reasons why you should add more content to your website.
Posted Thursday, June 22nd, 2006. Filed under Internet Marketing Tips, Link Building.
Here are 7 good reasons you might want more content on your website. Your homepage has lots of backlinks but few words, so you're losing out on your most powerful page since it's hard to rank for phrases that don't appear on the page. You've got 50,000 pages but only 100 have more than 50 words, risking supplemental status.
You've got the same content as 50 other sites, so Google will try to choose the one it thinks is "real," and it might not be yours. You've got hundreds of product pages with only a small description, making it hard to avoid supplemental status let alone rank for anything.
There's nothing on your site that's link-worthy to your peers or anyone else, so quality researched content can garner natural backlinks without asking for them. You've been targeting only 3-4 big phrases while ignoring the long tail, and content pages covering lots of 3-4 word phrases helps pick those up. Google tries to rank "resource pages" high, and resource pages tend to have lots of original content.
June 22nd, 2006 at 2:11 pm
Thanks for the great tip Jim.
I give this advice to all of my customers but I have a hard time getting them to practice this. A list like this is a good way to give them extra incentive to add to their content.
Good luck on the new content building service!
Spencer
June 22nd, 2006 at 4:12 pm
Jim,
Your whole premise about going supplemental seems to be Google-centric, which is good advice as Google generates the most traffic.
However, it’s very possible to make a nice chunk of change exploiting MSN and Yahoo which seem to be a bit easier to manipulate.
Still good advice.
BTW, what I tell a lot of people is to try to figure out ways to make employees and customers generate content, like reviews on products, etc. , which always keeps fresh and expanding content on the site.
June 22nd, 2006 at 11:16 pm
Another reason to create new content… is continuous, new fresh content is one way to get the bots to keep visiting your site, index your content quicker, and just maybe your PR will increase.
June 22nd, 2006 at 11:33 pm
Nice call Shimon!…that should be #8.
June 23rd, 2006 at 6:56 am
[...] Автор: Jim Boykin Перевод: мой, не без ошибок. Оригинал статьи: тут. [...]
June 23rd, 2006 at 9:56 am
Jim How about so people will come back to the site to view your excellent valuable information.
Set up a weekly addition of content and let people know about it. Build a how to section on the site and add a new article weekly, the bots and the people will return.
Perhaps even set up a table of contents with the release date of each topic listed.
In my opinion this is a big part in establishing a company and the site as an authority in the field.
Steve
June 23rd, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Jim, how about adding content because your prospects can learn from you and ultimately buy? We focus so much on SEO, that we forget who the customer is.
I like your list though.
June 23rd, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Igor yes,
Lets face it you can give people 100% of the information to have a very awesome site, 95% of them will not follow through due to time constraints or laziness. Show people how difficult the given task is and most will say dam I better hire someone to do this. The logical choice will be the person they learned from.
You give 1 you get 10 in return, this is marketing 101 and morality 101.
Perhaps WBP could set up a how to seo section? I would bet that you get lots of high quality PRE educated leads, which in turn will lessen the lightswitch customers looking for a “magic bullet” that is only earned through hard work.
June 24th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Well certainly yes.. Jim…
As google is known to look for fresh content in a way so that it could be satisfied that is really that site worth my notice??
Once it gets it answer (the fresh content regularly then it comes to you back and back real quick) and once it starts loving you then yeah… you are unbeatable…
Well one more thing… i m also SAM…
June 25th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Really useful information, thankyou Jim.
but the important thing to remember, even though its good adding content, it needs to be done regularly to keep it fresh. Search Engines pay a great deal of attention to when your website was last updated, and favour the freshest information !
June 25th, 2006 at 10:47 pm
Content sells and the se’s love it! There are still too many “salesy” sites that do the hard sell, instead of offer valuable content and in return build more credibility and ultimately sales.
Good content also gets spread all over the net for high backlinks and additional traffic.
July 4th, 2006 at 10:12 am
great advice, and equally great comments! =) you know how it is sometimes, when carry several ideas in your heads, do’s and don’ts, and it’s all jumbled?… thanks jim for putting it all together so nicely. real helpful!
it’s all a balance of useful content, seo, and marketing.
July 8th, 2006 at 5:06 am
Thank you, Jim for taking the time to write that down. We were nodding our heads!
I also agree with the comments here that it can be difficult to get this point across to clients, even when you show them actual results from other content you’ve advised folks to write, or from content you’ve written yourself.
We try to make them understand that THEY are the authority on their shoe/plumbing/gopher removal service and that if they just think about it, they probably have lots to say about the specifics of their products and services, but I repeatedly notice a hesitancy in many very smart people who simply seem uncomfortable with the written word.
We end up having to take on a lot of the content writing ourselves (which I suppose is nice, in one way), but on the other hand, we really do believe that the business owner ought to speak up…loud and long about what they are doing.
Thanks again, Jim!
August 1st, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Thank you, Jim for taking the time to write that down. We were nodding our heads!
August 16th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Precisely.
Pretty much everyone can do with adding content, is the conclusion.
September 15th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
“Google tries to rank “resource pages” high, and “resource pages” tend to have lots of original content.”
Totally agree + resources page should have quality content. Many of the resources site owners look for content at low prices and writers spin some already used content, that also deploys the essence of resources sites.
November 8th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
My Site has lots of that going on. I have a real estate site with many auto generated pages from property descriptions. I want to know if it’s bad to have the meta description the same as the content description of the page for that property.
I know I have about 9/10 of my pages in the supplemental index.
December 23rd, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Thanks for the straight goods on the art of linking and getting great quality backlinks. You’ve been a great source of info and love the quality resources I find along the way here.
Cheers!