Here's a shocker: Talk to any dozen corporate executives about what makes a good web site and more often than not you'll hear about eye-catching graphics, sexy animation, sophisticated page layouts, easy navigation.
You'll hear about everything except what's really important: words.
That's right.
What makes the World Wide Web spin? Content.
Not video.
Not audio.
Not vaguely futuristic, edgy graphics.
Words make the web go round.
So how come no one really talks about the text that goes into every web site? Because it's not sexy.
Conventional wisdom says words are dull and hard to come by.
Text is a grind to write and no one wants to think about it, much less do it.
But guess what? Words are what give your site value, searchability, stickiness and everything else that is good and noble.
If you want to edge out your competition, gain the coveted higher ground in search engines, and generally boost the relevance of your site, I'm going to let you in on few secrets: Add pages.
Have you ever noticed those sites with interminable scrolling pages? Miles of text unrolling in an endless scroll.
It seems like page after page of solid data.
But guess what? It's just one page, and that makes a mighty small target for search engines.
The smart thing is to break up those big scrolls into individual pages along logical lines - separate out, say, products from customer service, company backgrounder from news, and so on.
Just this simple fix will fatten your site from one page to perhaps a dozen without adding any new content.
Pay attention to headlines.
Here's another mistake you see all the time: a lame, nebulous headline such as "tomorrow's technology today".
Let's say your company makes oscillators for wireless communications; a much better headline would be "Oscillators for tomorrow's wireless applications".
Now, that may not be the most creative headline, but here's the magic - you just went from a headline that's worthless in a search to one that will generate solid leads from viewers looking for oscillators or anything about wireless applications.
Headlines featuring keywords hold the greatest value because search engines figure that if a key word or phrase is in a headline, that page is going to have the most content for that term.
Supercharge your text.
Now, go a step further and make sure your text - called the body copy - contains as many of the important words and phrases as possible without making it sound weird.
Again, the more key words that pop up in context on a page, the more valuable it is - and the higher it ranks - compared to a page of similar content, but with fewer key words in the copy.
Work your keywords.
Remember the pages you added earlier? That now enables you to spread the wealth of key words around.
Instead of just one, long page, you now have a number of pages, each ready to receive pertinent key words that will work in conjunction with the page contents to achieve better searchability.
Lazy people just copy one set of keywords and plop it onto every page.
That is a costly mistake.
The fewer and less varied the key words on your site, the worse your site will do in searches.
Make sure your key words are pertinent to the page they're on - search engines value pages with relevant keywords and content more than pages with words that are seemingly unrelated.
Archive, archive, archive.
Does your webmaster like to take down documents when they're "old"? If so, run down the hall and stop them right now.
Just because that white paper, PowerPoint presentation, or technical article is months old doesn't mean it's lost its value.
People search the web for information, and if the presentation you gave last month at the annual industry conference contained interesting, relevant information but is no longer appropriate for the immediacy of home page prominence, move it into an archive section or resources page.
Key word it, make it searchable, and you'll be surprised how many people actually click on it.
The more content on your site the better.