Your site probably needs to have upwards of a thousand pages of "content." Each page may attract, on average, 2-30
visitors per week, but really popular pages may attract thousands of visitors each. The popular pages need the other
pages for support. Preferably, your site should have tens of thousands of pages, but that is not absolutely necessary.
Each main page should be optimized for a single keyword, which should constitute 1-5% of the text on that page, should
be used in tags etc.
Each page links to the main page and supports it. It may also link to other "star" pages" that it supports. Select
auxiliary content that is related to your message but that is also useful for readers.
Basic permanent auxiliary content - If your site is selling security systems, content about principles of
security and the like is useful, as well as texts of US federal acts like Sarbanes-Oxley. If you are in
telecommunications, a glossary of terms is useful. It is all "Link Bait" that attracts links to your site and it also
will draw interested readers. It also increases the confidence of your visitors that you know what you are talking about
and will deliver a good product or a correct opinion.
For a health food site, articles on nutrition, nutritional tables and the like are helpful. Political sites should
include maps, timelines and historical documents as well as relevant statistics.
Any content you copy from free sources like Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia or public domain documents must be
accompanied by introductory text so that the search engines don't discard the page as "similar content."
One way to create content is to start a Web log that can accept entries by email and send links to relevant articles
there with your comments.
Remember that search engines can also judge similarity of pages to other things on the Web and may not rank those
pages very highly, or may hide them if they are too similar to content that is shown elsewhere.
Not all the content has to be extremely relevant or extremely original. Sometimes it is OK to take a public domain
book that is relevant to your site, split it up into Web pages and put it on the Web. You will not get many visitors to
those pages. But their links to the main page and other pages will help you boost the popularity of your Web site.
Event announcements and topical articles - These pages have a very brief period of importance and validity. They
are important because search engines like to see fresh content. However, remember that you do not ever want to remove
a page from the Web after it has been indexed, even if it is no longer relevant, so write content that will last.
Each page increases the importance of your web site and its visibility. A small Web site might get only a few visitors a
week for a new page. It takes a few days before that page appears in search engines, so it may no longer be relevant by
the time people can see it.
Dictionaries and and Glossaries - Dictionaries and glossaries are useful and therefore attract visitors and
links. If you set up a glossary of the Widget industry, you can generate hundreds of pages of useful information, all of
which support your site and are part of it. People will link to the main page of the glossary. The definitions can also
link to product descriptions relevant to your widget business, boosting the number of visitors to those pages.
Permanent Content versus Topical Content - At a small Web site, a topical article might get 200 visitors before
it is no longer relevant. Even at an established Web site, a topical article that gets 10,000 visitors total is exceptional.
Your annual board of directors meeting or charity gala was very important when it happened, and important people
attended, but not that many people are interested today in what happened in 1997. On
the other hand, a reference article or timeline or utility may get only 2,000 visitors a week, but it will get 2,000 visitors
a week for 10 years, and this number may increase as more sites link to that page and it becomes an important keyword
portal in itself. For a commercial site, that finds it hard to get links from competition, sponsoring a big technical
encyclopedia or information related to their product can be a "public service" If this is linked to the firm's site on
each page with appropriate keywords, it will also raise the Google pagerank (a measure of importance) of the firm's or
organization's main Web site. It can also be done as a section within the firm's Web site.
