Getting More Traffic

With my newly found revenue stream and revived faith in the internet economy, I turned my attention to traffic. I had this useful site with loads of content, but my traffic was still pretty low when compared to my peers. I was getting less than 10k visitor/month. That is when I started doing some research into the world of search engine optimization (SEO). I realized a huge market of potential visitors was going untapped due to the design and layout of my site. It was friendly and easy to use for visitors, but not for search engines. One of the first steps I took was to create more relevant and meaningful titles and meta descriptions for all my pages. Since most of my site is database driven, this involved some creative modifications to my templates/scripts. Next I focused keywords. I redesigned my main pages to use actual header (H1, H2, etc) tags. I simplified the pages. Just content and links to other related content on my site.

Later I would embed much of my non-content code (like navigation, menus, etc) into javascript includes. This would leave the actual source of my pages very clean from a search engine crawler's perspective.

Another strategy I worked on was translating my current content into more pages. More pages means more chances for folks to find me. I took my posts that had lots of content and split them up into pages. Not only did it make the readability better, but it increased my page count by about 30%! Next I offered different views to my content. One technique that worked really well was to offer local search capabilities. This allowed me to generate tons of new content focused on locale, and integrated location based keywords throughout my site.

My general rule of thumb was to examine the data I already had, and figure out ways to better expose it. By opening more of my content up to users, I was opening the doors wider for the search engines as well. The results were incredible. Over the next year, my traffic went from 10k to 50k to 100k a month!

It is important to note that the primary driver behind all this success is good content. My site has grown "naturally" with unique content over the years. This natural growth trend is much more attractive to search engines than a new site that suddenly has 100,000 pages. It takes a lot of patience and research, but it will all pay off in the end.

Next up... Adding Revenue Streams...