Forum Moderators: phranque
the More pageviews can be achieved if you have more content properly linked. The "related articles" thing or "random suggested article" can do miracles to increase page views.
Keeping content quality constant
Quality and unique. If more content is both of these, then it can't hurt to add it.
The 'big box' websites have clout/money to buy their way to the top. Most of these sites are nothing more than stores on a screen - and wasting the opportunity to be useful resources; offering more information than they ever could in a store. Mostly they only take advantage of the opportunity to offer more products than a physical store could hold.
The small players that offer useful information on websites are often rewarded pretty darn well in the search engines, especially in smaller market segments. Once you get some traffic, customers/users will tell others how informative/useful your site was as compared to the big players that have nothing more than the same basic information that everybody uses.
We are a small niche player, which helps a lot. We can't compete with price and/or shipping leverage that the big companies have. For $25 - $50 the really big guys can fight on price and ship free. Sometimes UPS Next Day, standard - free.
We're a few tiers down to say the least, but rank highly based on content. For example, almost any website that sells books takes the publisher blurb and posts a page. We are not book sellers, but do sell some books on some websites. We expect to sell X copies per year for Y years and invest Z time in building a page for each book. Unique content; a full 'book description and review'. Google loves us - and we sell more books - especially because we are also carrying the related products that you would want.
Our highly informational book pages help customers feel good about our site. We can't typically slash price or offer free shipping, so I am sure we close sales for bigger competitors, but we also close a lot more sales for ourselves. (If carrying product lines, there is room to sell books on a break even basis. They are only going to buy the book once - but they are going to probably buy supplies at the same time, and remember where they got it and go back to that source when they need more supplies.)
As a rule - the bigger the company - the less useful the website. So long as one can enough of the market to do well, word will get out that you have the better website. Google will help you. Content is King.
More content means more potential pageviews, yes, but site architecture dictates if that happens or not.
It's possible to have a million articles on a site with 99% of them being so deeply buried that they don't rank well. It's possible to have 1,000 articles return 100x more traffic than a site with 100x more pages. There is also a point of saturation in which your articles start to compete against each other for keywords unless your site architecture, together with titles and descriptions, leaves no doubt of which page should be credited for which search phrases.
Content is king but he walks hand in hand with the internal link structure queen.
Content is king but he walks hand in hand with the internal link structure queen.
How good do you think Wordpress is in solving this issue, JS_Harris?
