When you begin website building, you may be tempted to produce hundreds of articles and put them up at once. Indeed, there is a school of thought around website building that suggests going for this all-at-once process. This plan does not work for everyone, however, for two reasons. First, it takes significant time to come up with good content, and coming up with hundreds of articles at once will take a while. Second, this method means you are losing out on the benefits of building your traffic over time through gradual website building.
Knowing the Benefits of Slowly Building Your Site
A gradual website building project has several benefits. The first is that it takes the onus off of you as the site owner to create or pay for loads of content before you actually launch the site. That means you can invest less money or time into the site and get it online quickly. Google and other search engines judge sites, in part, by how long they have been available. Having 10 articles up for a longer time is more valuable than putting up 100 articles two months from now.
Search engines also favor dynamic projects, meaning website building over time will allow your site to be crawled by spiders more often. Having an article posted daily, or a few posted a week, will benefit your site more than posting in large bunches infrequently. If the search engine spiders detect changes to your site, then it moves up in the queue for how often to be searched, which will give your website building project a huge boost in organic, or search engine, traffic.
Sizing Your Website for Launch
One of the key questions people have when they begin a website building project is how much they should have available before they launch. In short, the site should have all of the sign-ups and initial advertising streams set up. As far as content goes, however, website launches should start with a good base of content. An easy rule of thumb is to have at least two articles on each section of the website. So if your top menu has 7 topics, you will need 14 articles to start. Don’t worry that your website doesn’t have many pages when you start. The key is getting good content up and building on it slowly.
Building Your Website Over Time
Begin website building plans with a few article titles in mind. When you design the site, plan to put in a few articles and then add to them over time. Work with a consistent schedule to develop a core of devoted readers. By putting articles up every Tuesday, for instance, people will know when to expect to find new content from you. Working this way also helps if you are hiring writers because the writers will be able to put you on a regular schedule, helping to get your articles to you in a timely fashion. Building the site over time also is less stressful, if more work, than trying to put together a huge site at once.