Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1. Creating Successful Websites

“Build it and they will come” is a wonderful line in the movies. Too bad it’s usually not quite so easy in real life! True, good web content is occasionally—not always—discovered surprisingly quickly. More often, it requires a great deal of disciplined work to draw traffic to a website, no matter how good the content of the site is.

And what is a good site and good web content, anyhow? “Good” does not mean a site with a halo! The way I use the word good in this chapter is perhaps self-referential: a site, and its content, are good if the site and its content draws traffic (or can draw traffic when suitably promoted).

The topic is important because having good content is the single most important determinant in where a site stands in search rankings and whether the site draws traffic. A site that draws traffic is a potential money maker, or can help you fulfill your business goals even if these don’t include direct revenue creation. Obviously, other factors besides content do come into play in determining search rankings, but there is no substitute for quality content.

Having well-formed and properly tagged content on a site is nice, but it’s not nearly as important as the site content itself. Keeping content fresh and making sure there are good links into your site help—but nothing beats good content.

Note

Inbound links, explained in Chapter 4, are at the heart of Google’s PageRank system. But the rationale for making these links important is that ...