With everyone and their cousin putting up sites it’s much harder to get found and recognized as an outstanding site, even if you’re just trying to appeal to a small, niche audience. What makes sites stand out and develop loyal followers is content. Good content may be informative or entertaining. It must engage visitors so that they feel they are getting something from the site. If you can achieve that, then those visitors will not only recommend the site to their friends, but they will return to the site over and over again.

The first rule of Web content development is freshness. You should be adding new or fresh content to it on a constant basis. This applies to regular sites as much as blogs. Visitors are going to stop coming back if the site is never updated.

Next you want to make sure that the content is easily digestible by web surfers . In the case of written content, this means breaking the text into easy to skim segments using lists, section headers and shorter paragraphs and sentences. For video or audio content, make sure the clips are short, with longer pieces broken up into parts, and that they instantly engage the viewer’s or listener’s attention.

Most important of all is relevance. It may be fun to put crazy videos or weird news stories on your site, but only do so if they fall within the overall theme and intent of the site. Drawing traffic to the site with irrelevant content may get you traffic, but it won’t translate into sales, customers, or loyal visitors. Instead you’ll just get a bunch of lookers with no connection to your site’s purpose.