Focus on content
| Static content is the kiss of death for a web site.
For how many times do we visit web sites and tucked at the bottom of the home page the Last Update line gives a date six or more months previous? And how many visitors then wonder if the company behind the web site is still in business? Quite apart from this unsettling thought, is the reality that regularly updated content gives visitors a reason to return to your site. Especially if the content is focussed towards their particular interest. The more reasons you can supply, the more likely your web audience will bookmark yours as a destination site. Repeat visits, naturally, mean the greater the likelihood not only of winning a potential customer, but also of making subsequent sales and ensuring repeat business. Before looking at content more closely, it should be flagged up that regularly updating your home page, at least once a quarter, helps improve your search engine rankings. While some home in solely on the keywords, many search engines also crawl over the home page and compare the content with the cache of the page from your previous submission. These search engines then consider static content when determining your site's ranking in search results. What, then, is content? Content is anything you can display on a web site: photos, text, graphics, news, currency converters and other tools, links, video and audio. And in the quest to gain eyeballs, content is a powerful agent to increase:
Repeat visits that last longer will help strengthen and forge relationships with customers, and help spark the interaction that is the hallmark of building your site into an online community. The spin off from this healthy net community you are able to cultivate is better web site statistics. Armed with good traffic figures, you will then be in a position to lever banner advert revenue, set up more prestigious link exchanges and take advantage of revenue-earning affiliate or click-thru programmes. The more unique visitors and page views you are able to demonstrate, the bigger your value to advertisers. Content that is relevant and in context will raise your value to your web site audience and differentiate your domain from the web sites of rival companies. Of course, this commitment to regular updating consequently entails having the means to do so. Firstly, how to get the content onto the site and secondly, sourcing it. Fewer small or micro-sized companies are now going down the self-build route onto the internet. Instead, they are contracting out their web site design and build to concentrate on core business activities. However, it can be a bit irksome having to pay another company for making small amendments to a site such as price changes for example. More and more companies want an element of control, and content management tools are now much more common. Essentially, these password-protected tools on the web enable you to open a template and pour in the text. Depending on the user's experience, these templates can allow full formatting or be pre-set to make updates as swift as sending an email. It is then merely a case of clicking the submit button and your new material is posted on the site. There are limitations, but this is no bad thing if what you want is a quick and efficient way to update your site. Few small companies, in any case, have the resources to dedicate an in-house member of staff to the company web site. So content management tools restrict the burden of extra workload, the scope for indulging ambitions to become the latest hot webmaster, and costs. With the means of delivery within your grasp, the next item on the agenda is the content. Time and space to create your custom-built content is very limited when you're at the helm of a small business. All available energy is, unsurprisingly, being expended at the 'coal-face' of entrepreneurship. But tailored content can still be yours with a free newsfeed. With the word free slipping rapidly out of the lexicon of the internet, more and more providers are now charging for their content. There are still some, though, who offer free newsfeeds or links that will automatically update on your site. All that is required is to register and paste in the html code they supply into your source. There are constraints, but with most of the free offerings you can select a number of news categories that will be of interest to your visitors. The following sites offer free or subscription newsfeeds and are well worth investigating: http://webfeeds.scotsman.com/ Scottish, UK and international news http://www.NewsNow.co.uk/services/nlinks/index.html World news and lots of categories http://www.freenewsfeed.com Offers e-business and technology news Much the same effect can be achieved by a button linking an orphan page to Google's News and Resources section (this is an option off Google's main search page. To truly target your audience, though, you may wish to have a bash at the content yourself. But that, as they say, is another story... |