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 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  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.   

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.