| Content: the key to increased website traffic |
By Donald Nelson (copyright, 2003)
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 bicycle, 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 e-zines, 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.
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Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker.
He is currently the director of A1-Optimization
(www.a1-optimization.com), a firm providing affordable
search engine optimization, submission and website
promotion services. You can subscribe to his monthly newsletter
by sending an e-mail to subscribe@a1-optimization.com
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