There's a rumour floating around the Internet that one and two page web sites can't possibly rank well in a Search Engine. Wrong. They can rank very well in any Search Engine, just not for more than two or three keywords. Yanik Silver has a site called Instant Sales Letters.  His site is at www.instantsalesletters.com  This site is a few pages and ranks number 1 for the search term "Sales Letters."  So  you can rank well for a keyword phrase with a small site. The more pages though, the better chance your site stands of being ranked more highly in the search engines listings. Now that links are dying out as a means of projecting a website up the rankings, creating enough interesting and varied information in the form of text is the thing that will get your site noticed above all the others out there. 

The trick is using enough text because to a search engine 'content is king'. Search engines like Google are ONLY interested in information, which is text. They cannot see images or fancy moving graphics. If you put between 100 and 200 words of txt on your main pages, your site will come higher up Google's search results.

If you want to dominate a category that contains dozens or hundreds of profitable keywords or products, you're going to need multiple pages on your site each targeting a different keyword from your category. In other words you need "content pages." A content page can be a product page from your e-commerce shop, a newsletter, a review of a product,  a listing of related web sites or directories of useful resources.. The point is each one of these pages is another opportunity for your website to improve rank.

You need to take care about structuring these pages so that they target the keywords that you've found to be in demand.  If you're an e-commerce shop owner selling car accessories, make sure you know exactly how people are searching for those accessories in the search engines.  Then, take each one of your product pages that relates to those keywords and optimise it for those search phrases.

If you're selling an information product with a variety of uses in a single industry, write as many article pages that you have search terms for.  Each article page should be optimised for one or two closely related search terms, and they should all, in turn, lead to your sales page. And don't forget, you can trade articles not just links with other web site owners.  While your competitors are slowly trading just one link at a time, you can beat by them by getting multiple links at once by providing quality content in the form of articles to other web sites.

Another good way to increase content is to use RSS  (Really Simple Syndication ) news feeds. Look elsewhere on this site for more information about RSS. There will be an article explaining it in more detail very soon.

Remember that Google and Yahoo! rank pages - not sites.  That's why you need to think about maximising your content, whatever it may be, in order to maximise your chances for ranking. When most people are looking for phone numbers of potential suppliers or traders, they go to Yellow Pages and not to their local phone directory. The same is true of the internet. The more pages your site has and the more content, the more chance end users have of seeing or finding your web site.

Avoid massive amounts of images and moving animations. and use plenty of informative text.  All search engines and especially Google, like text - the more of it the better. Google and MSN especially rank web sites in importance based on the amount of information they contain.  They have no interest in images, fancy backgrounds or moving animations or spinning logo's. 200 words of text is 50 times better than five images to a search engine. Also, they far prefer web sites to be written in good old fashioned bog standard html rather than Xhtml or Php, so keep it simple, and use plenty of informative text. Text on your web site is the absolute King!

If you can't write enough informative text yourself, then look for articles related to your product or service and obtain permission to re-publish that information on your website. A simple idea often overlooked.