In an age when social networking is all the rage and Google's "Search, Plus Your World" threatens to take over the search industry, we want to point out that most web and search marketing experts seem to have forgotten about the basics. Sure, it is great to add Facebook widgets, Twitter feeds, and Google+ links to your site, but don't forget the benefit of plain, old text. That's right, text...lots of it, on lots of pages. Text is the heart of good web site development.

It is almost like the whole web world has forgotten that it is text that got the online industry leaders to the top of the rankings, and it is text that keeps them there. Sure, it's also good to add photos, video, etc. to your web pages. Not only do these additional elements add spice and flair to your site's content, but they also get special recognition from search engines as well. Rich snippets, as they are called, are the listings on search engine results pages that include photos, frame grabs of videos, author information, etc., and they certainly all increase the likelihood that your site's snippet will get the user's click. However, it's not the rich snippets that got your site ranked well in the first place. It's the pages and pages of text, all interlinked together, that did the most work.

Do you think we are exaggerating? You can prove to yourself that this is all true. Just do a search on any competitive keyword. It can be a keyword from your own industry. It does not matter which keyword you choose. Then, as you look at the first results page, look at the green text underneath the clickable link for each snippet. That green text contains the web site's domain name.

For instance, I just did a search for the keyword "motorcycles". Top of the list (not surprisingly) were the sites for Kawasaki and Harley Davidson. Further down the page were Suzuki and Honda. There were also some listings of local motorcycle dealers sandwiched in-between, as is typical with Google listings these days.

Now, what happens if I check the page count for Kawasaki's web site? That's easily done. I simply search using the "site:" operator and the domain name, "site:kawasaki.com". When I search on that, Google reports about 9,300 results. All of those 12,300 results are on kawasaki.com's web site! Next, I do a similar search, this time using "site:harley-davidson.com". This result is even bigger: 270,000 pages found on their web site. Now that is some serious web development, folks!

I can almost hear some of you jeering, "Wait a minute! You said that the relative size of your site controls how well you do in the search results! So how come Honda comes in second behind Kawasaki? Tell me that, smart guy?" Web developers everywhere cringe at that.

The answer is much simpler than you think. Google tells us that they track over 200 factors when deciding on page rankings. PageRank, which is the driving force behind the importance of page count, is only one factor. Google doesn't even tell us what most of those factors are. SEO Experts know, perhaps, 10% of them, and even among those a lot of the claimed knowledge is often smoke-blowing. So we really have no way of knowing for sure why, in this case, Kawasaki placed ahead of Honda. However, if we skip to, say, page 3 of the rankings where I find bigdogmotorcycles.com, a site search of bigdogmotorcycles.com shows that site only has about 500 pages.

Size of site cannot explain small differences in ranking, but the pattern that puts the largest sites near the front of the rankings holds true much more often than it fails to hold true. The most common exception is when local site listings are included in the results, and this happens whenever Google thinks the user is looking to buy the item locally.

So, if you are a local business, all you really need is to show up as a local business in the listings, right? True, but it turns out that site size also plays a large role in determining which local businesses appear in the local section of the rankings. Once again, using the site: operator to compare the relative sizes of websites among local competitors shows that the tendency toward larger sites dominating smaller sites is very consistent. Again, the pattern is not perfect, because of all those other mostly-unknown factors Google tracks, but the pattern is remarkably consistent.

We are experts at web development, and we can take your existing web site and develop it even more at very, very affordable prices to expand and grow its page count, thereby improving your rankings and your web site traffic. Call us today at 540-428-2787 for a free quote.