A question I am often asked is, "How much content should I put on my site?" The answer is surprisingly easy, "How much have you got?" A lot of people confuse the issue of organising information with quantity of information. They want the site to look clean and simple, of course, and think perhaps the adage "less is more" might apply here, hence the question.

It's a good question, and if you are asking it as well you need to also ask yourself if there is anything you want a prospective client or customer to know about your business that you would actually choose to omit from the site. Think about that for a moment, why would you withhold a crucial piece of information that might secure you some valued business? You wouldn't.

The issue is about organising your information in a user-friendly, logical way, however much of it there is. Someone has landed on your site because they are actively seeking information, they want to know more and are making the effort to find it. They might have found you via a search engine, or they might have been prompted by an advert, or any number of other reasons it doesn't really matter, the point is they thought they would find what they were looking for on your site. The last you thing you want is for them to not find it. You will have wasted your time and money in setting the site up and driving traffic to it, but more importantly your visitor will feel they have wasted their time and you may never recover from that set-back.

The other reason to put up a lot of content is to increase your chances of being found in the first place. If people are out there searching for products or services you offer and using terms and phrases relevant to your business, it pays to include those terms and phrases on your web site. And for each term or phrase, the more it is mentioned on a page, the higher that page will appear in search engine rankings. So it pays not just to make a list with them all, but to write at least a paragraph and maybe a page about each. That will have the supplementary benefit of establishing your credentials which would be a good enough reason in its own right.

It would be a false economy, however, to think about creating a new site piecemeal, as some do. They intend to put up some basic information and add the rest when they can get around to it. But they often do not and they are missing valuable business opportunities. Launching a re-vamped web site is probably your best chance at a boost in your search engine ratings and some extra traffic because search engines love fresh content. But more than that, every visitor who lands on your site and sees the dreaded "under construction" notice or a promise of more information if they come back later is turned-off your site and they rarely come back.

So the final answer to the question, "How much content should I put on my site?" is "As much as you can, and as soon as you can."