The
key to increased website traffic
The key to increased website traffic
Everyone wants to have a lot of traffic to their website. In order
to get this traffic many people try to work on their meta tags or
even do tricks trying to get more visitors to their website. One
of the simplest and most solid ways to increase the flow of traffic
to your website is to offer more content. It has often been said
that on the Internet, content is king. It is important to understand
how more content can bring more visitors to your site and how to
generate content that is related to your particular web site.
Why do you need more content?
Many websites are actually company brochures that have been adapted
to the web. They merely describe a bit about the company or service
and then add some contact information. Such websites usually have
about 5-10 separate html files. If these pages have a good amount
of text it is possible to optimize them for several keywords and
web surfers may find the site.
However, if these sites are in highly competitive fields then it
may be difficult to build a decent amount of traffic because search
engines try to find the most important web sites that can answer
a search query. Search engine robots look for keywords in the meta
tags and in the text on the pages to determine what the site is
all about.
However the search engines also look at the links on the various
pages. If your main page is about bicycles, for example, and you
have links to other pages on your site relating to the same theme,
perhaps, racing bicycles, mountain bicycles etc. then the search
engine will conclude that the site is about bicycles, and if you
have a lot of pages on this theme, your site should rank higher
than someone with a company brochure site of a few pages.
In addition, as I have pointed out in a previous article (http://www.a1-optimization.com/deep-submission.com),
each page, with its content on your particular theme, stands out
alone as a mini website in itself and may come up in searches on
the Internet. Thus people will often enter your site through the
"side" or "back doors" and not the main page.
The more pages you have the more chances of being found in searches,
and the more different keywords you can optimize your site for.
So, by building a content rich site on a particular theme, you
will boost the chances of your main page to come up in searches
and you will increase the likelihood of overall traffic through
your other pages coming up in good positions in Internet keyword
searches. In addition to this, the more content you have the more
respect your page gets from human-edited directories (such as dmoz
-Open Directory Project), and other webmasters. If you have quality
content then you swill get more link requests, requests for permission
to reprint your articles in ezines, more links to specific pages
on your site. All of this will result in more traffic.
How to build more content?
Depending on the type of products or services you are offering,
there are several ways to build quality content for your site. Here
are a few examples
Product Reviews- If you are selling other peoples
products, through an affiliate system, rather than just listing
a link to the product, you can write a full review of the product,
explaining how the product helped you and what are its strengths
and weaknesses. This kind of content actually pre-sells the product,
as well as being interesting reading in itself. If you have your
own products you could give background information on it or get
satisfied customers or users to write the reviews.
Background information- Every product or service
exists in some kind of context. Suppose you have a hotel in a particular
city. Instead of only listing information about your hotel, you
could give some pages about the history of the city where the hotel
is located or information about popular tourist attractions in that
area. The possibilities are enormous.
Questions and Answers- Let your web visitors help
you in the process of content creation. Start a questions and answers
section on your website or in your electronic newsletter. Not only
will you get insight into what your clientele is thinking, but by
answering these questions you will generate useful content for your
site and for your newsletters.
Bulletin Board Forums- Your web visitors can also
directly write the content on your site through a bulletin board.
Some bulletin boards are searchable by search engine robots, while
others are not. If you have good content on the bulletin board you
can also re-publish it on the main sections of your website to insure
inclusion in the search engines.
Articles by others- There is no need to recreate
the wheel or spend a lot of time writing, if that is not your cup
of tea! You can also publish the articles of other people. There
is a lot of quality content that is available free of charge. While
you usually have to provide a link back to the author of the article,
this is a small price to pay considering that some of these articles
may pull in tons of traffic.
Finally, if you are wondering how to arrange the increased content
you have two main options. Some people actually build a second content-rich
website to draw traffic and then direct visitors to their sales
site. Another possibility is to add an articles section to your
existing site, or simply to link the new pages to the particular
product and service pages that are appropriate. Whichever option
you choose, you can expect to see an increased flow of traffic as
a result of the quality content that you have added to your website.
About the Author Donald Nelson is a
web developer, editor and social worker. Hehas been working on the
Internet since 1995, and is currently the director of A1-Optimization
(http://www.a1-optimization.com),
a firm providing low cost search engine optimization, submission
and web promotion services.
|
