Content is king and your content site is your kingdom. When the adage “content is king” was first coined, the web was, in many respects, a simpler place for Webmasters. Creating a website with ten to twenty pages of keyword rich content would generate excellent search engine results and a mass of traffic as a result. Note that keyword rich has now been replaced by keyword optimized – a subtle difference, but a difference nevertheless.

However, the web evolved (difficult to imagine that it’s only now considered web 2.0). With the evolution of the web came a much greater demand from web users. Where the static content site was once the epitome of everything good about the Internet, that is less true of the most recent incarnation of the World Wide Web. Your website visitors demand more, but are you able to offer it? We look at various methods of including more content on your website.

More Pages
OK, we’ll deal with the most obvious method first. Add more pages. It’s simple and it might be considered old school to many, but it still has a place. The more pages of content you have, the more information you can provide and the more keywords you can target. The math is simple and the technique is devastatingly simple.

Try to add new pages for new topics and, if a particular topic looks like being too verbose, split the page down into several parts. Hosting plans usually allow for a lot of disk space so you should have no problems with space limitations in this respect. Content Management Systems are often included as part of a hosting control panel, again making it much easier to add more pages to your website.

Add An Article Directory
This is a similar approach to adding more pages in many respects except that it allows for a slightly different structure. An article directory is an excellent way to offer visitors more information on the topic of your site. Articles can be categorized, and include deep links to the appropriate pages of your site.

Articles are very marketable, in the sense that if they are well written, other websites may be inclined to link to the article or even republish it in full with all links to your site left in place. If you simply want to add more content, and use the resulting pages as online real estate, then you could consider accepting article submissions from other authors and Webmasters. You receive free content while the authors receive exposure.

News Section
News items related to your industry or even your business can be a good excuse to regularly add content. As a general rule they will contain what will turn out to be reasonable long tail search results and you can optimize the pages. Good news or press releases may be picked up by other industry news sites providing you with more exposure as well as genuinely useful content for your site.

Let’s not overlook that it’s always good to brag. Modesty will not win you customers, so if your business or website achieves something big then brag about it. Inform your customers how they too can benefit and the advantages that your news gives to them.

Forums
Some believe that the forum is becoming outdated by more modern web 2.0 applications and portals. While this may be true, the forum can still be used to your advantage although only in the appropriate circumstances. Forums provide a means for people to communicate with one another, and if you can create a vibrant and lively forum, you will instantly attract regular visitors.

The forum can also be used to direct your website visitors. If there’s a particularly hot topic, then link to it from one of your pages. If somebody (even you) posts a particularly beneficial post, then link to it from one or more of your pages. Conversely, you can also point forum readers to the main pages of your site. It is possible, with certain forum applications, to replace all instances of a word with a link to one of your pages – a quick way to flow traffic into your main site.

Blogs
Who hasn’t heard of blogs, right? They caused a huge debate when first introduced. Early bloggers claimed they would be the future of the Internet while more skeptical marketers and Webmasters decided their popularity would dwindle eventually. The former certainly came true and it seems there are blogs everywhere, within every industry, and on every conceivable topic.

Blogs have been turned into books, books into blogs. Blogs have even been turned into TV series and, again, vice versa. If you’re not blogging then you’re not communicating because a blog really does provide a superb way of communicating with your visitors and your customers. And, you guessed it, it allows you to add a lot of good content to your site and will usually draw good search engine traffic for your efforts.

Frequently Asked Questions
An old favorite of the Internet marketer. The FAQ page serves a number of purposes, but primarily it is used to prevent an excessive number of phone calls and emails with simple questions. An FAQ page can also be used to highlight some of the main benefits of your service or product. For example, if you sell trainers, and deliver them the next day, one of your questions could be:

“Q - How long before my Nike trainers are delivered?”

“A - We offer next day delivery on all orders placed before 2pm”

That’s a very simplistic view, but it can help to sell your product. Also ensure that you include some of your more important keywords through the questions and answers.

Knowledgebase
A knowledgebase is essentially the next step up from an FAQ page. Instead of having a single page with all of your questions and answers you would create an article or short article that concentrates on one question or one tutorial. Once you have built up a good number of these you have an excellent point of resource, a good way to attract visitors, and a method of keeping unnecessary customer communications to a minimum.

Feeds
RSS and XML feeds are not new, but they are good for adding content to your site. Look for other sites within your industry that offer feeds and embed them into a page or several of the pages of your site. This can help with SEO because the better feeds update regularly and the search engine spiders believe your site content updates regularly.

These are just some of the more basic but effective methods of adding more and more content to your website. Anything that enables you to add more words has the ability to help increase traffic and conversions, and provide your customers with an invaluable resource that they will hopefully return to time and time again.

If you don’t already have a blog, then get one. At least one. You can combine a blog with other methods of adding content. For instance, you can add other people’s articles, or your own articles to the pages of your blog. Alternatively, you can use a blog as the news section of your website. They are easy to design and typically very easy to establish and integrate into your website.

By Matt Jackson
WebWiseWords crafts various forms of web content. If you are looking for anything from article writing to blog writing, then visit the WebWiseWords site today.

As a site owner, it’s important to devote what link building time you have to creating connections that count – really count – as far as search engine spiders are concerned. In fact, there’s a range of site link types – links diversity. Some are more valuable than others. Spend your time and resources building the highest quality links and you’ll quickly see the value of these efforts.

Hosted Content
Hosted content, also sometimes called pre-sell pages, makes your site look very good. The problem is, there are usually costs involved. Here’s how it works.

You, the content expert, write an article. It should be longer than 600 words but no longer than 1200 words. It should be well-written, completely researched, edited, re-edited and finally proofed so that it’s letter perfect. Okay, now you have host-worthy content.

Hosted content is content that’s placed on another site for a fee. In other words, you rent a page on another site to display your work. Now, what do you get for your money?

First, position your article on a site that’s (1) related to the topicality of your site and (2) has a tons of one-way links to content that’s “deep” in the site (in other words sub-pages that rank well in SERPs based on their title tags, for example). These two factors are the best way to measure and quantify the strength your page has in the target site, and ultimately, the link love it creates passes to your site. As you already know hosted content creates editorial inbound links, also known as pure gold.

Second, because it’s your article and you’re paying for the space, you can embed text links directly to specific pages of your site. This does a couple of things. First, you spread your web net further. Links to your site now appear on other sites – some several incarnations removed from your own site. This, ultimately, increases your site traffic as people read your interesting commentary and click on those embedded links to see what else is on your mind. That’s good. More hits. More page views. Higher conversion ratios.

Third, if you spread your words across the web, you start to develop some name recognition within your niche. Unless you’re Dan Kennedy or Skip McGrath, it’s tough building name recognition. However, by crafting numerous, informative articles you’ll start to be recognized. And wait until you Google your name and find 15 SERPs because your articles appear on dozens and dozens of sites.

The downside is the cost. Site owners charge you for the use of their space. If you’re well capitalized, no problem. Spend the money to spread your words. If money is a problem, choose your host sites carefully. Use Google Analytics or ClickTracks data to determine not only number of unique visitors you create from these pages of hosted content, but quality of traffic as well. Look for sites that match the two criteria above. Very important.

Article Submission
Okay, money is a problem. You don’t have a lot. You can still get your name and your opinions out there through various article submission sites.

Once again, site owners need great content and many rely on article submission sites to pick up fresh content for free. Here’s the deal. You write an article and go through the same steps of researching, editing and proofing until the piece is pristine and makes you sound like a savant. Perfect.

Now you place that piece on sites like www.goarticles.com or www.ezinearticles.com for free use by other sites. The plus side is, if the content is solid, you’ll get picked up by literally hundreds (even thousands) of sites. And in return for the free use of your written brilliance, the sites that display your content are obliged to include a link back to your web site. So, you put out 10 articles on topics related to your business, each one gets picked up and used by 20 other sites and you’ve got 200 non-reciprocal inbound links. Well done.

But isn’t this the same model as hosted content except it’s free? No. There are two key points to consider. First, with articles you syndicate it’s much more difficult to embed editorial links to your targeted web site. Instead, you take advantage of the target link and anchor text in your bio box that appears at the end of the article.

What does this mean? Ultimately syndicated articles are not unique content like hosted content is, and ultimately it’s more challenging to place links to your own site editorially without appearing to be hyping your goods or services. So there’s a tradeoff when you go the article syndication route. The key, just as with hosted content, is to have killer, useful information in order to entice webmasters to repurpose the article for their communities and give you credit, a bio and a back link.

But, it doesn’t cost you anything but your time, assuming you can string words together into cogent sentences, or at least your brother-in-law can.

If you’re good at syndicated content or article submission, you control the anchor text – the actual links readers click on. You can also embed editorial links in syndicated content. Now, these aren’t links directly back to your site, but they will take the readers to a target page that you want them to read, so if you’re building links for other sites in your portfolio, this approach has a proven track record.

Reciprocal Links
Sites still exchange links. The concept isn’t moribund, but it certainly doesn’t have the impact a non-reciprocal link has. Reciprocal linking is simply an exchange of links. You link to my site; I’ll link to yours. And since spiders follow links, it’s not a bad arrangement.

A couple of warnings, however. Any site with which you exchange links should be related to the topic of your site. If you’re selling baby clothes on your site and you’ve got a link to a transmission fix-it site, you’ll get nicked by the search engine. Remember, the whole purpose of a search engine is to provide useful, relevant content to users so any links you exchange should be considered from the point of view of the site visitor. Is that link going to further the search of the site visitor or is it a dead end?

If a site appears to have a significant number of back links, and better yet, ranks well in the SERPs, it’s a likely candidate for a link exchange even if it’s a PR 2. Look for quality sites, or at least quality characteristics.

One-Way Link Building
This comes in several forms. First, there’s the ever-popular ‘link begging’ where you contact a site owner (you can find that information in Whois, if it’s not on the contact page) and basically plead your case to have that site owner accept your link. This is a tough sell because, naturally, the site owner wants to know what’s in it for him or her. Custom written, tailored emails tend to do better than form letter emails, obviously, and there’s definitely nothing wrong with a phone call provided you make it abundantly clear what you have to offer.

There are paid links programs. For example, www.textlinkads.com lists web sites willing to sell links to your site. You can bid on the cost of the link, agree to the length of time the link will appear and where it will appear. There are other programs that will hook up sites – usually with decent PRs – with site owners looking for good deals on paid links. Again, don’t forget to buy links with relevance to your site.

You can pay to advertise on another site with banner ads, though this has been shown to deliver lukewarm results unless you know your market very well. Do a competitive analysis and see what’s working for the competition. The click-thru rate on banners is less than 3% but they aren’t usually too expensive.

Finally, you can post your thoughts and opinions on forums and blogs related to your site. Each post will create a back link, but one that spiders will recognize as a blog back link – not a bad thing, just not a gangbusters way to build site credibility, especially considering that most links have a nofollow added and forums capable of giving any link love tend to moderate (and eliminate link spam) quite heavily. Don’t be fooled though, links even with a nofollow attached still have some magic – even on Google.

From hosted content to blog posts, anybody can get a little recognition on the web. And if you’ve actually got marketing capital, you can pay for hosted content and watch your site grow quickly.

Very quickly.

By Frederick Townes
Frederick Townes is the the owner of W3 EDGE Web Design. W3 EDGE is a Boston web design company that provides extensive conversion optimization, SEO-friendly web designs and Internet Marketing services. W3 EDGE is also pleased to offer their clients reliable professional web hosting solutions with tons of features and extremely fast servers.

Designing your first website is a stressful undertaking. It requires you to dig deep into your business in order to write the copy for your site. You need to work with a designer and go through the process of creating a site that looks unique and works well. Plus you’ll end up investing a lot of time, energy and money. And finally, after all that, you’re finished and it’s time for the site to go live. What a relief!

Many business owners go through this same process. By the time the process is finished, many entrepreneurs are very glad that it’s over - and don’t want to do it again anytime soon.

Unfortunately, websites don’t last forever. Even if you plan your site to work for the current vision for your business, you can’t accurately account for the entire future of your business.

Eventually you’ll have to make some changes to your website. Some of these changes can be accomplished with simple maintenance, and by making updates to your site. But there’s only so far that patching and revising your current site can go. If your site is particularly outdated, or if it’s not working well for you, it’s probably time to consider a full-scale site redesign.

Some signs that it’s time to redesign your site include:

Your Business Has Changed or Grown
If your business is no longer the same as it was when you designed your site, chances are that you should redesign your website to reflect that. If you’ve only had a few small changes, you might be able to just update your current website. But, if you’ve changed your business direction, decided to offer new products or services, or if your company has grown significantly, it will pay off to redesign your site. Reconsider how the changes to your business should be reflected or addressed in the structure, design and strategy behind your website.

Your Site Looks Like It Was Designed in 1995
Some signs of an outdated web site include: chunky, slow-loading graphics, old-style “framed” coding, where the site is divided up into panes that load separately, little animated cartoon clip-art throughout the site, and text created as images instead of in HTML. Having any of these on your site could reflect poorly on your business, making you look ‘behind the times’. It can also make you look like you don’t care enough about your business or about technological advances to keep abreast of them. Keeping your company’s website looking modern will increase its credibility.

The Information on Your Site Isn’t User-Friendly
If you cringe when you read your site text, or if you regularly get questions on your site text from visitors, re-structuring your copy or rewriting it can help to fix these problems. If you’ve been adding to your site over time and the navigation has become unwieldy or confusing, restructuring your navigation could be another pressing reason to redesign your site. You want visitors to be able to easily find their way around your site and to be able to access all the information you have within a few clicks. Laying out your site to make that possible can make your visitor’s experience on your site a lot easier.

You Apologize for the Site When Referencing It or Handing Out Your Business Cards

Your site should be a source of pride. It should offer your clients and prospects an easy way to get a lot of information about your business. And, if you have to apologize for out-of-date information, broken images, poor design, difficult navigation or anything else on your site, it makes you look unprepared and unprofessional. Make sure your site is in top shape and looks impressive, so your clients believe your business is in good shape too.

You’re Not Getting Good Results in the Search Engines
Poor rankings in the Search Engines can be a result of not optimizing your site well. Poor search engine ranking can also be a result of bad design choices or coding on your site. Make sure that your site isn’t designed using frames and that the text is coded in HTML. Flash sites are also more difficult to optimize for Search Engines.

It’s Not Bringing in inquiries and Helping You to Make Sales
If your site was designed long ago, then there’s a good chance that it was designed as “brochureware”. This means that the site was designed just to act as an online brochure. This was very common a few years ago, when websites were new. But recently businesses have realized that a website can do a lot more than just impersonate your brochure - it can help you close sales, bring in new prospects and make your business easier to run. To bring in more inquiries and make more sales include the following when you redesign your site:

• Calls to action to encourage your visitors to take specific actions - like purchasing something, contacting you, or signing up for a newsletter.
• Forms, scripts, or programs to make your business easier - like contact forms, project estimating tools, and an autoresponder email series that can help you keep in touch with your clients and prospects. Including a shopping cart or Paypal buttons on your site can also help you to make more sales without any additional work.
• Downloadable information packets, articles, questionnaires and white papers can answer a prospect’s questions about your products or services and help them to move closer to buying. And, if you require the prospect to enter their email address or other contact information, it can help you to grow your prospect list as well. These are just a few of the functions that your site can perform for your business. To get ideas for other ways that your site can help you increase your business, look at the other sites that you visit and note the functions they perform.

Your Site is Costing You a Fortune to Update
If you’re racking up huge bills because of changes and still have a lot to go, it might be time to consider a whole site redesign. Make a list of everything that you want to do on your site and consult a web designer about redesigning your site with those changes in mind. Often, if you have extensive changes to make to your site, it can be less expensive to just start over.

If your site is designed in Flash or coded in such a way that you can’t maintain it yourself, redesigning and re-coding your site could allow you to do so. Having the ability to make changes and update your own text will let you make revisions quickly, at no cost. And you can play with your site and make revisions to see what will work best for your business and clients.

If your site has any of the problems mentioned here, it’s time to redesign. The steps needed to update and revise will differ depending on the problems and issues that your site has - you may not have to start from scratch. But, do make sure that you address all of the problems that your site has so that you won’t have to redesign again any time soon!

By Erin Ferree
Erin Ferree is a brand identity designer who creates big visibility for small businesses. Her workbook, “Design a Website That Works”, will walk you through all of the questions that you need to answer in order to create the best possible website. Elf-Design.com   Web Workbook.