Content is an integral part of your website. It is what keeps people coming back to your site.  Take CNN.com for instance, as news breaks they are updating their website with up to the minute news and always changing the content to their website.  They currently are receiving almost a million hits a day to their site (click here to view statistics about CNN.com). 

One of the main reasons we emphasize content is this reason, if you keep the same content on your site month after month how do you expect to change the way visitors use your site?  Taking a few steps to keep them coming back will not only increase the amount of traffic your website sees, but can help your company increase business.

1. Change your content frequently. This does not have to be an everyday event, but reread a page and add/change content periodically (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly).  For instance read your About Us page; Have you added new employees? Is there any information on there that has changed since the last update?

2. Add a page to your website.  Adding a page will give your readers as well as give search engines a new page to read (yes, even search engines read your site).  Keep your readers coming back for more.  Another way to do this is to add a blog to your website (click here to read our blog entry on blogs).  Real Estate Exchange has taken advantage of this recommendation.  Some of their topics for their blog have been; 6 Things to Remember when Moving, Insurance Policies, and Precocious Killdeer joins the Real Estate Exchange just to name a few.  A blog gives you an easy user interface to add pages and content to your website.

3. Add a Refer A Friend Box. By adding a refer a friend box on your website will allow your visitors to easily send out an email to them from you saying, “Hey, checkout this website, I think it is pretty cool”.

By using these examples to improve your company will give people a reason to come back to your website.  Feel free to give us a call to answer any questions you may have or to help you implement any changes you would like to have happen to your website.

Greg Whitehead
PHP Developer
Toys for Tots Liaison

Directly from Yahoo’s Blog
“We’ve been rolling out some changes to our fresh web data and crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed by the weekend. So, as you know, throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index. ”

Do you even know where you rank on yahoo? If you don’t, you should contact your web company and have them run a ranking report for you. You should be able to have such a report run for you on the same day for less than $100. If you don’t know where you rank, then you likely don’t know if this yahoo change is affecting you in a positive or negative way.

If you are affected in a negative way, then you need to make changes to your site to ensure that you can move back up to the top of the results. It will take time, but it will take less time if you are aware of what is happening then if you sit back and watch and don’t make any changes.

Matt Ward
President
Central Mass Web Design

As Central Mass Web Design prepares for our 5 year anniversary and open house, we had a bit of a close call today. We almost had an open house, literally speaking. What I mean is that I live near the airport in Gardner, Massachusetts and today a small airplane crashed. The crash site is very close to my house.

I hope that all of the people (3) on board are doing ok. As I write this I am unsure of their status. They were airlifted out after the great work from the Gardner Fire Department managed to free them from the wreckage. It’s my understanding that the Gardner Massachusetts Fire Department had to use the jaws of life to free the passengers of the plane.

I moved to this home just after I started the web design company, and I never really thought much about the airport. It’s rarely noticed, few planes fly in and out, infact I sometimes think it’s used more for the radio controlled hobbie club that will fly their competitions there every now and then. Except for one other incident (a parachuter landing near my house, which on the scale of things is really not a big deal) nothing else has happened.

As I write this article, advising our readers of what happened, I have to tell you how thankful I am that nothing happened to my house, my family, or my dog. I also have to tell you how thankful I am that my neighbor Louie has removed his solar light lamps from his long driveway. In years past I was very concerned that someone would mistake his driveway for the runway and I might see a tail of a plane in his garage someday.

Many boston based websites are writing stories about this accident. You will find the major news outlets are as well. I want you, our readers, to know that I will continue to update you with more information as I find out more.