In creating a website, there’s a real danger of building web pages that are not useful to either the Search Engines or the searchers who might land on them.

Content is king! You’ve heard that over and over again and it is most definitely true. Content is what makes your pages:

  • relevant to the Search Engines for ranking purposes
  • useful enough to appeal to and engage searchers
  • interesting enough to encourage linking from other websites

These are all critical factors in attracting good, targeted traffic to your pages. BUT, you need to have enough interesting and unique content to accomplish these goals. Without that critical component, creating new pages is pretty much a waste of time.

Is a page with less than 100 words on it going rank well because Google finds it to be the most relevant? Not likely. Is a page with 2 sentences that are nearly same as the two sentences found on 20 other pages of the site interesting and appealing? Not in my book. Is a page with nothing more that 3-4 links on it going to prompt other people to link it? Probably not. Yet, I often run across pages like these on websites and wonder “what the heck was the designer thinking when they put this up?”

I think that sometimes they are hoping that they will get content for it at a later time. If that’s the case, then wait until you have the content before you make the page live and link to it from elsewhere on the site.

Other times, these types of pages seem to exist for organizational purposes only. In those cases, the site architecture needs to be seriously rethought. Adding pages like this only pushes better pages deeper down in the site structure, making it harder for them to rank.

Creating good, keyword rich content is not an option. It’s critical to online marketing success. It isn’t a job for lazy people or those with nothing to say. So, before you add a page to your website, think about what content you are going to put on it and who is going to write it.

Then, remember that if you don’t have enough unique, interesting content to put on a page, then you probably don’t need that page, do you?