Earlier this week we were in a strategy session with a new client helping them to understand the value of dramatically expanding the scope of the content they planned to add to their new retail website. We want to encourage them to move beyond the picture-price-paragraph that still characterizes too many web retailers, and instead become a massive information warehouse on their unique market segment.

Yesterday I noticed Jacob Nielson's new Alertbox article, which provides interesting data and view, mostly supportive, on the idea of expanding site content and specifically the number of site pages. Jacob points out that a typical linear graph of page views shows how dominant a few pages are in the total traffic of most web sites, but that if you instead plot a double-logarithmic chart what you see is that in fact the less visited pages do contribute significantly when aggregated, but in the case of most sites there really aren't enough pages to fill the long tail. So it droops, as you can see below.

It would take a lot of pages to fully fill the tale in Jacob's example (259,000 to be exact) but the idea that there is traffic out there for more content on your topic is one that doesn't require these types of impossible numbers, nor does the tail have to be filled all at once. It is interesting however, that he shows the filling the tale would be worth a doubling in site traffic according to these projections.

Expanding the size of your site, if done with quality relevant content, almost certainly expands the range of search terms from which you'll draw traffic, and if wisely architected into your site should improve visitor satisfaction and potentially return and conversion rates. Blogs have helped some people turn at least one part of our websites into ongoing 'works-in-progress'. It would benefit all of us - marketers and site visitors - if more sites would continue to pick our tails up off the floor.