Forum Moderators: open
There are a few pages of info/content on the site, but that's all that is needed from a marketing standpoing.
We're primarily working on building our network of affiliates and partners that link to us. Should we also go ahead and add a bunch of content/articles for the search engines, or does the amount of content on your site not really matter these days?
Any content we add will most likely be ignored by all but the most curious of our visitors, because most are already very familiar with the product, how it works, etc. and there just isn't much they could want to read about. So the additional content we add would be primarily for the search engines.
Is it worth the effort, or should we just focus on good quality incoming links with appropriate anchor text?
the additional content we add would be primarily for the search engines.
Not really. The additional content would primarily be for the people using the search engines.
Not everybody searches the same way, using the same words and same word order. Some folks eat a brown bag lunch, others carry their lunch to work in a brown sack. If you can develop additional content, working in different phrasings and combinations, you should find that you might pick up more traffic.
Kind of related: Some while ago a couple of us were talking about the pros and cons of discussion boards to a manufacturer's site. The user-provided copy was a definite plus with many different variations on product names, common mispellings, additional uses, the entire gamut of things people search for.
I don't think I worded my question properly though ...
All else being equal, will a site with more content (assume the same keywords and phrases, identical incoming links, etc.) rank higher than a site with less content?
I guess what I'm really wondering is whether the lack of content on our site hinder our quest for good rankings, even when we have 1000s of links linking to us with good anchor text (a variety of our important phrases)
1) A large quantity of pages increases your internal anchor text benefit (assuming you take advantage of it)
2) Quality articles are likely to get your site linked to, and especially give your site deeplinks.
3) A wide range of articles is going to broaden your reach, and allow you to mop up all the oddball searches that may only happen once a day, but 1 search a day multiplied by 10,000 searches makes for a lot of traffic.
For example, if we wanted to add 20 new articles they would all be very similar, just focusing on slightly different ways to say the same thing. For example ...
red widget
green widget
blue widget
etc. etc.
These widgets are all identical except for the color.
These widgets are also known as fidgets. So we could have:
red fidget
green fidget
blue fidget
etc. etc.
To have dozens of pages of "content", all practically identical except the fact that they are talking about different colored widgets, or identical widgets known by another name, seems very unnatural. It seems like the kind of thing you could get penalized for. No?
There just isn't a whole lot to say about this type of widget ...
