These things are far too hard

It seems that with the credit-crunch / recession that we’re already in (as far as I’m concerned) that my customers focus has changed – dramatically, literally all my customers are working differently now. Up until three months ago, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing with people asking us to develop new websites and applications.

Thankfully the phone hasn’t stopped ringing yet, but the questions I’m being asked now are clearly different to those in the not so distant past. The common theme is quite clearly about getting more from existing websites and web applications than it is about creating new ones, a change which is clearly sensible.

So, as you’d expect, a large number of the calls I’m receiving are regarding search engine optimisation and building more traffic to websites. So when I was asked again today “how can I bring more people to my website” I decided to try and get some ideas out there and this is really what I said to my client.

The main thing is to write good quality content – loads of it, I know this has been said to death, but the more articles or posts you can get on a website the better. And what’s more, never delete any of the articles, build them up into a vast, deep website with lots of well-structured good readable content. Never delete any of it, even Mr. Tim Berners Lee himself says “cool URI’s don’t change“, so keep that content up and don’t ever remove it.

Remember that people don’t always find your website via the homepage, so the more pages you have with good content, the more visits you are going to get, the more links you are going to get and the more visits and links you get the better your website will rank.

This will do more for you than any amount of writing good keyword lists, great descriptions and building links from free directories.