Quality or Quantity: What Is Best For Your Website
Saturday, March 31st, 2012Much of the internet marketing community is divided on the question of where it’s better to provide a ton of content on your website(s) or to focus more on quality content. Google has been constantly making changes over the last few years in ways which gives us definite clues as to what the answer is. Recently I read that the amount of information available on the internet doubles every 74 hours. If that is true then clearly quantity wins the competition hands down. Only problem is how do people get what they are looking for when looking for something amongst all this information. It’s like trying to drink from a fire hydrant. Not easy and not advisable.
It is getting increasingly easy to produce content in quantity. You can now get plugins, especially if you are using WordPress, that will give you content automatically. It may be that this is great from a production point of view but the content created is not attractive and really does not create something that is beneficial to human visitors. You can attract people to your website using this method but you will probably not keep them there for long and it is doubtful they will return again.
Setting up a ton of ‘thin’ sites, ones with very little real information of interest to human visitors, and hoping that people will come. Software is setup, loaded with keywords that the website developer has chosen to build the site around, and then the software searches the internet for it and brings it back to place on the site. The content aggregators can even be setup to drip feed the content to the site and be left to run on autopilot for months, even years without further intervention from the site owner. However the same problem as mentioned in the previous paragraph soon becomes an issue. While content created like this can be of some interest to people when they visit your site they are not likely to find it interesting because of the way it is presented and they will quickly be on their way to find what they want elsewhere.
The key thing is to provide content that is valuable to your visitors and is going to keep them engaged for sometime and possibly have them coming back again. Quality content that will achieve this does not come cheap or easy. It is important to work hard creating content at the start to get the benefits later and ongoing. I think the best attitude to take when creating content is to put yourself in your visitors shoes and realise that if you don’t find information that is going to meet your needs you are going to be disappointed.
Value can be measured in different ways. Reviews are a great way to provide value to your visitors and if that is what the visitors you are targeting are wanting then that is what you should provide. Don’t just place links, things like Adsense ads, to try and make a quick few cents from clicks, provide information that is going to inform and educate them in their buying decision as that is what they are after. Are you site visitors looking for information on a specific topic like gardening in winter, especially where it snows, then make sure you help them find that. I know that’s a very basic example but it really needs to be that simple. The effort it takes to provide good quality content can be and usually is considerable but it will be worth it to get happy customers who will come again and tell others and we all know that word of mouth is the most powerful sales tool.
An additional thing that is often missed when considering this quality or quantity question is what about viral traffic generation. It is more likely that viral traffic begins to happen for your website when people find something there that they find interesting and helpful, then they will want to share it with others. Social sites, and sharing on and through them, are now probably one of the best ways to have information get into the hands of those who are interested in it. The buttons for the social networks on your website are more likely to get used when the information you have for your visitors is quality, so make sure it is.
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