Collect a Whole Bunch of Unique On-topic Content

Succesful Web sites provide their visitors with a whole bunch of unique content. Search engines, designed to find valuable content for their users, send most of their free traffic to content rich Web sites.

You need awesome content to catch users, and you must update your Web site frequently to build recurring traffic. That is users bookmarking your site, syndicating your RSS feeds, subscribing to your newsletters, emailing your URLs to their friends and linking to you on their home pages.

Search engines will recognize your update frequency, crawl your fresh content and updated index pages daily, and will send you even more free traffic. Editors of Web directories more likely list active Web sites. Webmasters of related sites do link to well maintained sites, often without request. Users of social bookmarking services and other Web communities like message boards tend to ignore static Web sites, but they do recommend great places.

Publishing outstanding fresh content daily is the key to success on the Internet.

You need a backlog of articles to feed your site when you’re sick or traveling. Since most sites don’t update on weekends, it’s a good idea to do so. You won’t believe how many surfers hunt for fresh content on weekends.

Although humans can surf the Internet following links in flash presentations, linked images or hot spots on graphics, search engine spiders are blind and do not enjoy your multimedia content. If you offer a video clip, provide a descriptive summary in plain text. If you show pictures, put a short but keyword rich ALT attribute in the IMG tag, and add at least one paragraph of descriptive surrounding text. On thumbnail galleries use ALT tags too, and put a short description under each thumbnail. Make every page spider friendly, that means avoid Web pages with less than a few hundred words of readable text.

Publishing unique content leads surfers to your site. If you pull your text content from pools, chances are the pool itself or any other Web site making use of the public domain content will outrank you. If you submit articles to pools yourself, keep them short and link to your site. Never post text snippets from your Web site.