Dominate your market niche.
I’ve often said to clients that if they give me an 8-page website to work with, I can help them get more traffic. If they give me an 80-page website to work with, they should be able to generate many times the volume of traffic that their 8-page website would generate, and if they give me an 800 page website to work with, they will dominate almost every website out there that has been created for that particular topic or set of topics.
Many clients believe that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is some sort of tricky insertion of keywords into the site, or, a few years ago, submitting websites to various search engines continually would help gain a higher position in the search engines. Those are simply myths. To continue with the 800-page example above, I would imagine that almost every topic associated with whatever your website is about would have been written about. There would likely be an article about every major and minor topic possible. The only restriction or caveat is that the articles should be interesting, and they have to be original.
How does content help in the search engines?
The search engines like content. That’s half of the reason they exist. The other half is people and they just connect the two – they connect people to content. More content offers your site:
- Better positioning
- Positioned in more keywords
- Combined effect of a resource site
Better Positioning
Let’s talk a bit about linking. Getting inbound links to a page on your site is one way to make it to the top of the search engines. It always has been that way. For example, Google’s model is dependent on validation or confirmation. If someone on another website creates a link on their site that points to your website, your website benefits to some degree. How great a benefit is always changing, and as the years go by, Google has become much better at weeding out the bad links from the good links. If the link is from a source that is above reproach in Google’s estimation, then that’s a great link. Imagine getting a link to your website from, say, the White House, or a major news network. That would carry much more weight than getting a link from the insect collection blog of a kid in your neighborhood. Links are rated. Links don’t have to come from an outside source to be of benefit. They can come from within your own site. You, as a website owner, have a great deal of control over those links. As you create content, you
Positioned in More Keywords
Let’s talk a bit about long-tail keywords. Those are keywords that got their name by drawing a graph of the traffic various keywords brought to your website. At the “head”, the traffic is very high from very few keywords. At the other end of the chart, there are dozens, or hundreds, or perhaps thousands of keywords that brought three visitors, or two, or one in the time frame being measured. That is where the “long-tail” comes from. Your website does not show up in searches, technically speaking, pages from your website show up in searches. When you have pages that cover every conceivable topic and sub-topic, then you have a viable candidate for every possible search result. You probably have a page that answers the search for a lot of different searches. One great keyword might bring in 10,000 visitors to your website over a period of time. Over that same time, 10,000 keywords may bring in one person each. The volume of traffic is the same, and because some of the keywords are going to be quite specific, it’s possible that the traffic from a large number of keywords is going to be more valuable.
Make Your Site A Resource Site
The ultimate benefit is to have your website considered to be a resource by the search engines. If your site is thorough and addresses all aspects of the topic, then that’s exactly what the search engines need and they will reward you by giving the pages of your site a higher position in the search engines. A resource site depends on a mix of “evergreen” content and blog subjects covering topical matters. Evergreen content is that which, as the name suggests, never grows old. It will still inform people years from now just as it did today. Adding to the content volume of your website will produce great results for you over time. As your content begins to grow, so does your traffic, often at an exponential rate. Set aside some time to develop an 800 page website. Even if you fall short, adding relevant content to your site will increase the volume and quality of the traffic to your site.