Create A Website That Ranks: Part 1 – Content

We often get called by customers to "fix" their websites traffic problems. Over the years of dealing with this I've developed a methodology that I'm going to share over the next few posts, hopefully going into enough detail to offer a thorough path to follow, for building a killer ranking website.

The overall simplified description of how to get good rankings is more content, more links. Let's dig into those concepts and then see how much deeper the rabbit hole goes.

Part 1 – Planning With Content in Mind

More Content – You probably have a core set of pages for your site that you agonized over getting just right. However, most business sites that I see have far too little content. One of the core reasons that we like blogs as your website is that they make it much easier to add more content to your site.

Fresh, unique content can come from a number of angles. There's news, reviews of others content, your take on the latest issues in your industry, new developments in your business, how to articles, expert information articles, video articles and audio articles.

You can also add press coverage that you receive, image sections, reviews, even story and testimonial sections to your website. You can have user generated content in the form of comments, and forums.

The more content you add, the more hooks you develop that might grab traffic and search engine indexing. Most people don't realize that search engines rarely index all of your site; if they do and the information isn't evergreen, it often is supplanted by fresher, more authoritative content, and then search engines will delete your content from their database.

The problem search engines face is that there is too much content being made for them to find, store and make sense of it all. It takes to much processing power and time. Many people are still coming online and creating new websites.

The bigger problem is that there's just too much crap from the article spinners, content factories, content scrapers, software generated content, multi translated content, etc., etc., all built to fool the search spiders. They cannot index it all. So search engines take shortcuts. They don't index all of your site unless there's specific signals that guide them to index it… We'll get to those later.

A good working strategy is that when you create new, valuable, interesting and unique content you attract both humans (traffic and links) and the search spiders, and that spurs greater indexing of your website.

Plan your site to have easily added sections that you will add content to. More unique content almost always gives you a big advantage over your competition.

Part 2 Directory Naming

Looking forward to your comments...