This is a subsection of “Ten ways or so to good Web Design and SEO in Austin” covering make a blog, publish articles and or post your products.

I mention in the main article to do steps 4-8 and build your template before creating other pages. So build you blog and tweak it. Don’t publish anything and continue to step 8.

Web site content drives ranking and visits. Of course links matter but if you have good content, people will link to it and search engines will give you high ranks. Good content can mean quality and originality, quantity or both. What content? Whatever the customer is good at. The customer needs to publish or tell you to publish an article on a regular basis, preferably once a week. I had people tell me they don’t have enough material to publish on a weekly basis. Each time I changed the subject, started asking questions about the business and over 15 minutes the customer told me enough stories to cover 3-9 weeks of articles. Once I pointed that out the customer understood. Just keep in mind that any business is a complicated microcosm where stories do not lack but they are too many.

If the website sells products, they are the content although it never hurt to publish articles also. If there is no online store, publish articles. Ideally each article should be a separate static page which can be tweaked for maximum SEO performance. Alas, that means a lot of work so a blog is a convenient shortcut. While blog software is big, clumsy and slow, it provides a fast way to publish and automatically perform all the tedious housekeeping tasks (sitemap, index, presentation, so on). Any blog application such as WordPress is common enough that search engines do not penalize you for uncompliant pages. The plugins, gadgets, themes and how-to’s are plenty and the sky is the limit for customization.

Are there any rules? Of course, be honest and stay to the point. Any business, no matter how boring it sounds has enormous quantities of content available. Write in easy to understand terms, keep it simple and keep publishing once a week. Yes, some articles will be better than others but overall the more articles there are the higher your ranking and the more visitors the site will have.