Use the numbers game to your advantage

A lot of companies assume that they only have one entry in the search engines per website. But it's actually per page.

Why does this matter?

Well, understanding this difference is crucial to understanding why blogging is so powerful.

So what's the difference between a website and a webpage?

A website is the entire collection of your webpages. Your homepage is one webpage, your contact us page is another webpage, each of your product pages will be separate webpages.

If each website was on the search engines only once, the number of pages/webpages in your website wouldn't matter. If there are, say, a billion websites, each website would have a one in a billion chance of showing up in any given search (ignoring all other factors). The number of webpages on your website wouldn't increase or decrease your chances of showing up in the search results.

But, it's not like that. When you search for something on Google, it doesn't just direct you to a particular website, it directs you to the specific page on that website that it thinks will interest you most. The search engines have an entry for each page on a website.

So if every website has 10 pages, then that's 10 billion entries in each search engine. If you've paid for a budget website with just one page, you've now only got a 1 in 10 billion chance of appearing in search results (ignoring all other factors).

You might pay a bit more and have a 4 page website, but that still gives you only a 4 in 10 billion chance. You're still below the average. You're still shooting yourself in the foot.

The upshot of all this is that you can increase your chances of showing up in any given search by increasing the number of pages on your website. And this is why blogging is so powerful. Every time someone writes a new article in their blog, a new page is created.

When I wrote this article, a new page was created. This article itself will help to improve our chances of appearing in search engine results.

More pages doesn't just increase your chances of appearing in any given search, it also increases the number of search keywords that you are likely to show up for.

For example, let's say that you sell blue widgets, red widgets and green widgets. You will have a given probability of appearing in search results for those keywords.

Now, let's say you wrote a blog article about yellow widgets. You don't sell them, but you just wrote an interesting article about yellow widgets. That page will now have a chance of showing up on searches for yellow widgets, even though you don't sell them. Someone searching for yellow widgets might now find your company. Before writing that article, they would never have found you. You now have the opportunity to convince them of the benefits of your red, blue or green widgets.

You need to maximise the number of pages on your website.

So what extra pages should you create? Well, in theory, anything. Write about anything you can think of with even a vague link to your industry. Writing a "blog" might not be suitable for every business or every industry, but you should certainly have a section where you can publish any articles you can think of. Write about any news that you have, any big contracts or orders that you've received, or new staff that you've taken on. And of course, if you send off a press release to the local press, you should definitely put it on your website too.

But what if you have to pay your web developer every time you want a new page created?

In short. Get a new web developer. One who understands how the internet actually works in the 21st century. All due offence is intended to some of our inferior competitors there :-)

A web developer who does not offer a content management system (CMS) as standard, probably won't be in business much longer anyway. A content management system allows you to update your website yourself, and add new pages. Some of them make it as easy as writing a letter in something like Microsoft Word.

Contact us if you would like any more information on using a content management system for your website, or if you would like more advice on improving your search engine rankings.