Driving Traffic to a Site

The first goal of SEO is to draw traffic to a site. But traffic is drawn to sites that are good. So let's take a look at two perspectives on what kind of content draws traffic.

First, a web site worth practicing SEO upon should be a worthy beneficiary: a site with content that at least theoretically has the ability to draw traffic.

Second, one SEO techniquein the absence of this worthy contentis to create it from scratch. So bear in mind that creating content to draw traffic is one of the most effectiveand simplestSEO techniques. As such, it's worth having a look at content that draws traffic.

Content That Draws Traffic

• There's a great deal of variation in goodsuccessfulcontent web sites. The purpose of these sites varies from humor to practical to editorial opinions and beyond. It's hard to generalize. But successful content sites typically do tend to fall into at least one (maybe more than one) of the following categories:
• The site is humorous, and makes visitors laugh. While humor is a matter of personal taste, and varies tremendously depending on demographics of the target, humorous features can draw a great deal of traffic to a site. One downside is that humor tends to get stale quickly. An example of a humorous site that is popular is Googlefight, http://www.googlefight.com, a site that compares the Google rankings of two terms such as "God" and "Satan."
• The site provides a useful free service. Web services that are free (and desirable) can draw astounding levels of traffic. A good example is TinyURL, http://tinyurl.com, which provides a practical and very useful (but simple) service: it allows you to convert long, unwieldy URLsfor example, those you often see from Amazon.com when you select an inventory itemto short, convenient URLs that are easy to use in HTML code (and easy to enter in a browser). TinyURL gets hundreds of millions of hits per month, and is able to convert some of this traffic for other purposes (such as making money from advertising).
• The site is an online magazine, newspaper, or blog. Newsworthy content or interesting opinion pieces can draw considerable traffic. But the fact that anyone can put up a blog means that you'll have to go to considerable lengths to distinguish your content.
• The site provides practical information. Many people turn to the Web as their first line of approach for finding information: about technology, relationships, travel destinations, health, and much more. Adding useful articles is often one of the first steps taken by SEO consultancies to beef up traffic to a destination site. Obviously, the more closely related the articles are to the kinds of traffic you want to target, the better this will work from an SEO perspective.
• The site services a community, and provides communication tools for that community. The Web is largely about community, and involving community in your site serves several SEO purposes. Not only will your community help keep your content fresh, it's also self-selecting: if you enable your community with care it can help to tell you which topics are of interest, and what content areas will draw traffic.

Web Site Metrics and Measuring Traffic
An important component of SEO is getting a handle on web site metrics and measuring traffic. This is not as easy as it sounds, because a great many competing terms are used, and data is not always reliable.

From an SEO perspective, you need to establish a plan for measuring traffic so that you can find out objectively which SEO measures have succeeded.

How much traffic do you aspire to? Another important question, because SEO approaches will differ depending on whether you want to generate tons of general broad traffic, or if you are targeting a narrow (but significant) niche.

A good (and reasonably objective) source of information and metrics about general and high-trafficked sites is Alexa.

Related Posts by Categories