tip of the trade: march 2006

Content is King

It is not possible to overstate the importance of having good content on your website. Having a great-looking, fast-loading website will do you no good, if it doesn't contain content or information that people find useful and interesting. Furthermore, it helps to keep your site dynamic - add new articles, edit and expand as often as possible.

Having good content helps in several ways:

• It makes you more visible to search engines. It used to be that webmasters could add a few metatags to their web pages and call it a day. But the major search engines have come along way since then, and they now scan the entire webpage to decide what is relevant. As such, the more content you have,the more chance you have to be deemed relevant and placed high in the search results.
• It gives people a reason to visit your website. Customers and potential customers are more likely to check in regularly, to see what's new. Also, if you are selling a product or service, content that demonstrates your expertise and knowledge within the subject matter, builds trust and confidence in potential customers.
• Last but not least, having great content may encourage other webmasters to link their sites to yours, and this brings about an entire new set of benefits.

Writing your own content is the best way to ensure exclusivity and uniqueness. Although this can seem like a daunting task, if you set aside some time just once a week or month to develop content, write articles or whatever the case may be, you will soon have a large volume of quality material.

Another great way of generating fresh and interesting content is to incorporate a blog or a discussion board into your website. Both of these tools allow you to generate fresh, new content regularly, while at the same time inviting other people to interact with you. Such forums encourage new ideas and fresh perspectives, not to mention - your level of content grows more quickly than if you were generating it all yourself.

Contact mcElhinney Design today to learn more or get help with your web content.

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