Many people who ask me to build them websites are disappointed when I tell them that simply having a website is not suddenly going to shoot their business off into the stratosphere and that they are not suddenly going to appear first on Google’s search engine results pages (SERP’s).

There’s this expectation that once you have a website and you do certain things to it, you are instantly Google’s best friend and whatever is on your first few pages should immediately be high up in the SERPS. Well, the bad news it that’s simply not gonna happen, no matter how much search engine optimisation and how many meta tags you build into the sites code.

Getting good SERP rankings with Google (and other search sites) takes time and patience, but even then, the single most important thing that determines where your website ends up on the SERP’s is the amount of good quality content you have on those web pages of yours. Once people start to see quality content on your site they will probably link to it. The more links you have coming into your website the more importance the search engines attach it and the higher you feature in SERP’s. This takes time (and of course content).

So what things can you do to get more content on your site?

Dynamic Website Content

First and foremost your website needs to be dynamic. This means that it should be easy for you to update your pages and create more pages whenever they are needed. You don’t want to have to keep going back to your web designer/developer asking them to add this or add that. You’ll end up spending a lot of money. We’ll love you for it, but eventually you’ll get annoyed with all the invoices and we don’t want that to happen!

You also don’t want to get yourself caught up in the unholy mess that is Flash on the web. Sure, Flash movies look great and they look professional but they look like nothing but unsearchable files embedded on a page to search engines. And that’s exactly what they are: embedded, unsearchable files. If you put your content into them you may as well be giving Google a chinese puzzle to solve. You can use Flash, but use it wisely. Don’t ever put your content into it.

Content Management Systems

To put content on your site regularly and dynamically you are going to need a content management system, or CMS for short. The CMS will provide an interface that is browser-based for you to create your content. For instance, I’m not using any software other than the web browser installed on my computer to create this post. I simply logged into the Admin menu of WordPress and clicked on “Create a new post”. I could have created a page just as easily, but I decided to make it a post instead. The WordPress CMS gives me the functionality to do that.

As far as CMS’s go there are plenty to choose from. I’ve tried many of them, but have found that for my purposes WordPress is the simplest to use and also offers tons of extensible functionality (like the NextGEN Gallery plug-in I am using to show my photos). I don’t want to go into too much detail about it here, but what I want to get across is that if you want to create a really good website you are going to need the right tools.

Benefits of Dynamic Content

So what’s the long term benefit of creating a website and putting lots of relevant (to your business) content on it? Well, quite simply it supplements your marketing efforts. If you were a kitchen renovator you could use your website to show off your latest projects and do little write-ups about each of them. If your potential customer is looking for a kitchen renovator and it comes down to two of you who are pretty much on a par when it comes to quality workmanship, wouldn’t it be great to point them to your freshly updated website with photos of your last few projects?

I know if I was looking for a kitchen renovator I’d be more likely to go with the one that communicates best with me, and what better way of communicating with me is there than to let me see your work online in my own time? All you have to do is send me a link to your site and if there is enough fresh information on it I think you would stand a much better chance at getting my signature than the other guy who hasn’t got a lot more than his contact details on his website and pictures of jobs he probably did more than 5 years ago!

In a nutshell your website is a silver supplement to the ordinary marketing that you do. The thing that is fundamentally important is that your website should be more than just an online business card. It should be a place where you can captivate your customer and show him just how much you know about what you do.

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