Why Great Content Helps your Website

Few things help businesses improve their online presence better than having great content on their website. The basic reasoning behind why great content is so important is simple: it encourages return visits.

When was the last time you went to a website and decided to return? For many people, these are news sites. Returning to www.cnn.com or www.msnbc.com often makes perfect sense, because every time you go back there’ll be something new for you to absorb. This is also what makes blogs so incredibly popular, because of the constant updating of fresh posts to each particular site. This same concept can be applied to business and organization websites. If you were to go to a business website a few times only to find it unchanged with no new content, it’s likely that you won’t be returning again. From an internet marketing perspective, that’s a missed opportunity!

This issue doesn’t just occur with your everyday viewer. While it’s always important to write content on your website with your visitor in mind, search engines react to websites in many of the same ways as humans. With the proper steps, a new website will be noticed by Google within a few days. What Google does is send out a ‘spider’, or a coded program, to your website and catalogs all of your information. It essentially ‘reads’ all of your pages, stores that information and sends it to Google (who will then display it in the appropriate Google search results). Once it reads your whole website it’ll move on to another website. However, what if the ‘spider’ returns the next week? If it notices that there have been no changes to your website, and no added content, it’ll skip over to the next site. Think of your website content as ‘spider food’. If the ‘spider’ returns a second time to find no content added, it will start visiting your site less frequently. However, if it were to return to find extra content, or new ‘spider food’ to consume and take back to Google base, then it will return more often. The more often Google visits your site, the better chances that you’ll rank higher in the search engine results.

Why is this? The same reason a human would continue to return to your website. If you’re up-to-date with fresh ideas and information, then you’re considered relevant and useful. Google wants to promote the most relevant and up-to-date websites for each particular search people do. So by creating a great blog or resource center on your website, full of great, updated information in the form of articles, news stories, or even videos, then you’ll have visitors revisiting and sharing your business,  and Google coming to your website more often.