Middle Ear Media

Dynamic Content: Why it’s Essential

December 24th, 2009

There are many rea­sons to have dynamic con­tent on your web­site, but the two most impor­tant are to increase traf­fic and to increase sales. Dynamic con­tent will drive traf­fic to your site by help­ing give you a bet­ter rank­ing in search engine results. It can drive sales (assum­ing you’re sell­ing some­thing) or con­ver­sions by giv­ing your vis­i­tors a bet­ter user experience.

What is dynamic content?

Back in the day, a hyper­text doc­u­ment on the world wide web was a sta­tic file that looked the same to every­body who viewed it. If the page was lucky, it would be updated peri­od­i­cally, but for the most part, it just remained the same and col­lected vir­tual dust. If you’ve ever stum­bled across a web­site that looks like it hasn’t been updated in 10–15 years, it prob­a­bly hasn’t.

In con­trast, a dynamic doc­u­ment on the world wide web can be cus­tomized for each user based on indi­vid­ual con­di­tions or para­me­ters. So it could show dif­fer­ent con­tent depend­ing on the time of day, a user’s pro­file, oper­at­ing sys­tem, browser or just about any­thing else.

Some­times referred to as “con­di­tional con­tent”, it allows a more unique expe­ri­ence for the user with per­son­al­ized mes­sages and such. With dynamic con­tent, the con­tent is sep­a­rated from the design and stored in a data­base. The con­tent seen by the user is gen­er­ated at the time of request at the server level using CGI, ASP, PHP, or a con­tent man­age­ment system.

How does it drive traffic?

Search engines, or more accu­rately, their search bots (also known as spi­ders) crawl the web and index the sites they find. They pre­fer dynamic con­tent over sta­tic con­tent because they fig­ure some­thing that changes often is more rel­e­vant than some­thing that doesn’t. There­fore a dynamic page is more likely to ranked higher on a search engine’s results page and that means more traf­fic to the site.

How does it drive sales?

Even more impor­tant than its SEO ben­e­fits is the fact that human vis­i­tors like to see some­thing dif­fer­ent each time they visit a site. It keeps them inter­ested. If it looks the same every time they visit, they are much less likely to return again. We humans also tend to enjoy an expe­ri­ence more if it’s per­son­al­ized. For exam­ple, when a user logs in, they might see a cus­tom wel­come mes­sage that includes their name. No mat­ter how it’s done, if a user has an enjoy­able expe­ri­ence while using your site, they are much more likely to return again. They are also more likely to tell all their friends how great your site is, buy your wid­gets, visit your phys­i­cal loca­tion or sign up for your service.

Using a CMS like Word­press, Dru­pal, Joomla, etc., allows you to con­trol your dynamic con­tent very eas­ily, hence the mas­sive num­ber of “blog” type sites that have popped up over the last sev­eral years. The key to this is qual­ity not quan­tity. You must give your audi­ence some­thing that is inter­est­ing or impor­tant to them.

So, keep it fresh, keep it flex­i­ble, keep it dynamic.

Tags: ASP, CGI, CMS, Conditional Content, Drupal, Dynamic Content, Increase Sales, Increase Traffic, Joomla, PHP, SEO, User Experience, Web Design, WordPress

This entry was posted in the Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design category.