The Content Vomit Effect

A common error I see website owners make is something I call, “The Content Vomit Effect.” Website owners want their site to be crammed full of information. They want their photos, their videos, their articles, a detailed life history, and dog photos. The power and ease of web publishing captures them and they find a reason to post things. The problem is, this information is often irrelevant. It misses the point of their website completely and is detrimental to it’s long term success.

Less is More

The top spot on Google is a coveted position, and the competition for that spot varies wildly depending on the industry, and the keywords targeted. As you can probably guess, the top spot for web design companies, and SEO firms is under intense competition, one I am actively engaged in. A simple strategy to help boost your SEO position, and one I have used extensively on my recent site redesign, with great success, is to simply dump content and focus on only a few, core pages. The less you have, the better off you are.
Attempting to optimize every page of your website is a chore, especially for small businesses. You add in the fact that inexperienced people will often be making updates and your site soon becomes an ineffective mess.

Post Hesitantly

Focus on just a few core pages, and post new content hesitantly. Ask yourself. “Is this going to be useful to my users?” If you cannot answer this question with a definitive, “Yes!” Then don’t continue.

We are naturally inclined to write and talk about what we know, and what we care about. Embrace this inclination but be sure focus on quality over quantity. One of the biggest SEO facts to internalize from Google Engineer Matt Cutt’s interview I discussed in my last post, is that only good pages are indexed by the search engines. As you plunge deeper and deeper into a website, the likelihood that it is analyzed, drops precipitously.

There is nothing more depressing than spending your valuable time creating content that users never find, Google never indexes, and actively wastes your time. Just don’t post it. Spend that time building links, and optimizing the pages you currently have. You will have much more success and more sanity as well.