Your website plays many roles in your business. It informs your customers about who you are and what you do, provides them with your contact information, and if you write a regular blog, it even educates them on various topics related to your industry. All the content in your site fits into one of two categories: dynamic content and static content. Knowing the differences between these is important for getting the most out of your website design and search engine optimization.
What Search Engines Do
Search engines exist to provide everyday consumers with information as quickly and as accurately as possible. After all, when you head over to Google and type a phrase like, “What time does Mom’s Diner open,” you don’t want to see results for other restaurants or diners, and you don’t want to see results for Mom’s Diner half a world away. You just want to see the results for the specific diner you want to visit, and you expect the search engine to provide those results.
If a search engine provides you with incorrect or irrelevant information, you can either change your search terms or find a different search engine – and many people choose the second option. This is exactly what sites like Google and Bing want to avoid, so they have developed complex (and rather secretive) algorithms to crawl and index content and provide better results to their users. Whichever search engine is the best gets the most traffic, and more traffic means more revenue. These search engines try to provide the best possible pages to suit individual queries, and in order to do that, they must carefully consider your site’s content.
Static Website Content
As these search engines crawl your website, they look for two different types of content: static and dynamic. Static content can be defined as any content that does not change over time and remains the same across each page regardless of the visitor. This may be your contact information or mission statement at the bottom of each page, and it may also be your navigation menu or logo. It is much simpler for search engines to appropriately index static pages, but this doesn’t mean that more static content is better. In fact, in most cases, just the opposite is true.
The Different Types of Dynamic Website Content
Dynamic website content, then, is the opposite of static content. It changes frequently, whether due to user location, input, or preference or because the webmaster purposely changed the content. Some dynamic content is built right into the website, such as the information generated by a CRM when a customer selects from items in an online store. If he or she wants to buy a t-shirt, then the dynamic options would change based on the color, size, and style that the customer selects.
On the other hand, there is also dynamic content that changes at the webmaster’s hand, and the most common type of content in this regard is the ever-popular blog post. Google and Bing both love to see fresh, new content attached to your website, so keeping things dynamic by adding a new blog post or two every single week will go a long way toward improving your search results rankings. Every blog should be optimized with the right keyword density, relevance, photos, meta tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and more, as well.
In summary, your website should contain both static and dynamic content in order to meet the expectations of search engine algorithms. Dynamic content such as a changing storefront depending on your customer’s preferences is much different than dynamic content that you add to your site each week, too, so be sure that you are satisfying both requirements if you really want your site to help your business grow.