Insert Related Content into your Website

You need to insert related content into your website. Somewhere between ever more sophisticated graphic design and more complicated CSS, many website designers are starting to forget one of the ground rules of the web. This rule is the arguably the most important rule to follow at all times; one that you should always keep in mind when you're designing your website.

So what is it? It's simple. Your visitors visit your website to get specific information, so you got to insert related content.

Search-Driven Webs

Recent studies had shown that well over 90% of web users now have a search engine as their homepage, and utilize it for around half of everything they search for on the web. Unless you're advertising your site intensively, most of your users are likely to arrive by means of a search through a search engine. However, they're relatively unlikely to just be searching for a description of your products. What are they looking for? Specific Information!

There's a reason why the web was once referred to as the 'information superhighway' – while some people might be actively looking to buy things, most of them are just looking for information.

Relevant Articles for your Content

So, if you're selling products, you need to provide related articles that your potential customers are likely to want to read. The bigger the audience you can build for your articles, the more conversions you're going to have to sales. I cannot emphasize enough just how important your content is: if it's badly-written, or not useful, your visitors are likely to just go back to their search results page and try another link. If you give them good information, though, you instantly create the kind of loyalty that no number of advertising dollars can buy.

What many practitioners of techniques like 'search engine optimisation' don't realise is this: you can't fake good content. However many keywords you might stick into it, you'll fool search engines, but not the visitors they bring in – all you're doing is costing yourself money in bandwidth and wasting your visitors' time.

No Time to Write?

The most common objection I hear when I tell people they should write great content, is that they have no time to write the amounts that would be needed – and, yes, writing can be very time-consuming. What you have to realise, though, is that there are plenty of ways around this, such as hiring a freelance writer to do some of the work for you, or using speech recognition software.

You might also consider buying content from people who resell it, or even getting your users to write the content – there's nothing better than getting visitors to write their own content and then getting more visitors from search engines where people have found it. There are even sites offering content for free in exchange for a link back to them at the bottom of the article, although you should be cautious about reviewing the quality of content offered this way.

Keep it Updated

Here's something that many people don't realise: it's better to write a little occasionally than to write a lot all at once. This means that, even if you have written hundreds of articles, you should release them one by one on a regular timescale. Both visitors and search engines prefer sites that are updated often to ones that have a big pile of content dumped on them once and then aren't touched for years.

Content Makes Money

Nowadays, it's once again possible to make money from good content without even having anything to sell. Plenty of businesses were based on advertising back in the dot-com boom, but ad prices eventually dipped too low for this to be sustainable. Ad prices have now recovered, however, thanks to text advertising.

You can sign up with most of the big search engines now for context-sensitive ads for your site that are chosen automatically – Google AdSense runs the most popular service. This kind of advertising eliminates human 'ad editors' altogether, while producing ads that are targeted enough to give far better returns than they ever used to. Purely content-driven websites with ads are once again a viable revenue stream, and content is as much King as it's ever been.