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Websites Need Two Things To Survive In The Wild
I have been receiving a number of questions from clients and readers about how to generate leads and income from their website. The questions that I get are:
“How come I can’t get my website indexed on Google?”
“How long does it take to get to the first page of the search engine?”
“Why doesn’t all my pages get picked up by the search engine spiders?”
These are all good questions. As a follow-up, people go on to ask:
“I’ve read a lot of the internet marketing material that’s available for free online, but now I’m just confused.”
“Some people say to do this, others say to do that, I just don’t feel like I have enough time to do everything for my website that is needed.”
“Is there really a ‘push-button’ method to get my website noticed in the sea of websites?”
So many questions, so little time. Luckily for all of us, there is one short answer. Are you ready? Here goes:
–> Websites only need two things to survive in the digital wilderness that is the Internet –>
- Content that is updated regularly.
- Incoming links.
Forget every other convoluted idea and explanation that you may have run into. Websites grow and thrive in the wild because they get fresh content and new incoming links on a regular basis.
Let’s cover content first. Content is any text, video, audio, images, and/or applications that you add to your website. For human interest, this type of content is perfect. It keeps your website visitors interested in staying longer.
For search engine spiders, this variety of content is not as useful. Here is why. Search engine spiders are not very smart. As I have said in a previous post, the search engine programs are basically a box of rocks. All they can reliable “see” is text. So if you have fancy pictures without proper tagging, the spiders simply don’t see them. And what they don’t see, they won’t register into their database of websites.
My suggestion then is to always include text. Include text in your pictures, your videos, your audios, your flash, and your applications. An easy way to add description is to add your keywords as part of the surrounding description paragraph.
The next popular topic around website content is, “How do I get content for my website?”
Content comes in two flavors.
- Original content that you or an outsourcer writes.
- Syndicated content that is available for you to reprint on your website.
Original content is easy to explain. You write the content. You publish the content on your site. Nobody else has that content. Search engines love original content. They eat it up like ice cream on a hot day. This is because the search engines like to show-off fresh content to their searchers.
Syndicated content is a little trickier. A good way to explain syndicated content is newspapers. One newspaper sends a hot story through the news wire and other newspapers pick it up and publish in on their site. The same thing happens on the web. If someone writes something interesting, other sites will pick it up if the owner of the content allows it.
Based on the syndication model, there could potentially be a lot of duplicate content on the web. This is where the tricky part comes into play. The search engines, being resource constrained, will only index the top few pages with duplicate content. They don’t want to store and serve up the same story repeated across a dozen or more web pages.
So how does the search engine decide which web page to show on the search results? This brings us to links.
The second thing that websites need to survive on the wild are links. If a website has a lot of content but no one else links to that website, does it have a lot of content? It’s like the story of the tree in the forest: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it fall, did the tree fall?
Of course the tree fell. Of course the website has a lot of content. But does it matter? The answer is no. We write content for other people to consume. The one way that we measure consumption is how many link to our content. If it is indeed good content, other websites will link to the content. The more links that we get, the better our content must be for why else would others want to link to it? This is exactly how search engines measure the relevancy of our website. They count the links.
So there you have it. If you want your website to grow and thrive, keep publishing content and keep building links.
Comments
Or, you get someone to write the content for you. Content writing is a huge industry right now, and not everyone who has gotten into is knows what they’re doing. Some, however, do it professionally and can create great, original, content.
There’s also PLR content, which is less expensive than original content, but it is duplicate.
Private label content or PLR is a great way to supplement content on your web properties. There are two aspects here though. If you use PLR straight with no modifications because you like the content as-is, it will save you time and your readers would not mind. The search engines, however, may mark the PLR content as duplicate and not index it.
However, the way around this is to build links from authority sites to the PLR content. If you build enough links, the search engines will index it in my experience. This is where bookmarking becomes important.
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