With websites, bigger is better

Reports on the varied things people are searching for when they happen upon this blog are always an interesting read. The one that caught my eye most recently was "reasons to change your estate agent" - let's hope that was a pro-active agent, rather than disappointed home owner!

I've mentioned before that blogs are great for generating this sort of varied search traffic, but there is another benefit too. When it comes to websites, did you know that bigger is generally better?

It's a little known fact that the more pages a site has, the more valuable Google perceives that site to be.

Without getting too technical, the maximum PageRank (one of the components that Google uses - think of it like a vote count) for a whole website is the same as the total number of pages that site has.

This is increased and decreased by incoming (good) and outbound (bad) links, but that's the essence of it.

So, by adding more pages, your site's maximum potential PageRank increases.

Now, I'm not recommending that anyone adds lots of pages just for the sake of it. It's more important that pages are substantially different, provide useful content for your visitors and, in doing so, target a wider range of search phrases.

But it's a nice side benefit (and the starting point for a lot of the more technical SEO stuff you can do!).