Where traffic really comes from
Most sites get a large proportion of their daily traffic from
popular search engines.
This is by far the biggest traffic driver to most sites.
Another large traffic driver is incoming links from other busy
sites or from hundreds or thousands of small sites.
It is usually hard to directly replicate a busy site's incoming
links network so we won't dwell on this. Instead we will focus
on what is easy, replicating a busy site's performance on search
engine ranking across the board. You will find that once your
site is busy because of search engine traffic, your incoming
links network will grow automatically as more people find your
site and link to it. Higher numbers of incoming links (called
link popularity) boost search engine rankings. It is a good
vicious cycle that keeps itself growing - and you want that!
This high search engine traffic depends on the following things:
The total number of pages the site has. The more pages, the
higher the traffic. Why? Think about it. Say your site has only
10 pages and each page draws in an average of about 7 visitors a
day from the search engines. That's 70 visitors a day (10 pages
x 7 visitors per page). If you now had 100 pages instead of
similar nature, you would now have about 7 x 100 = 700 visitors
a day instead of 70. Its that simple!
Basically, most sites get a trickle of traffic per page on
their site. Each page manages to be found by only a relatively
small number of people a day from the search engines. Depending
on the search subject, usually only about 10 - 30 or so people a
day, per page, even on well visited sites. Why? Because most
pages on average, on a particular site, do not rank highly on
search results. But occasionally you will find a site with
dozens or hundreds of pages with good search engine rankings.
By pure chance or careful planning, these pages are optimized
for the search engines. Now say you had 100 pages each pulling
in an average of 10 visitors a day from the search engines. Your
competitor also has 100 pages but they pull in an average of 70
(or even much more) visitors a day due to better optimization.
Guess who will be writing the success story.
Looking at the log files for keywords or phrases typed into the
search engines to find these sites (yes, log files can tell you
that, too), you discover that these busy sites are found by a
much larger range of keywords than their less busy competitors.
For example, a low traffic site selling wedding gowns may have,
in all the text on all its pages, only about 10 keywords and
phrases related to wedding gowns (e.g. wedding gowns, weddings,
marriage, bride, bride, etc). But a busy one may have over 50
related words and phrases, including less obvious but related
ones such as registry service, bachelor party, bucks night,
wedding planner, etc. Even though the site only sells wedding
gowns, someone looking for a wedding planner or bachelor party
information would most likely also be interested in wedding
gowns. And on their search for these other words, if they bump
into a wedding gown site, they will be interested in exploring
it. Simple math: if one keyword gets you 10 unique visitors a
day, 60 different keywords of a related nature will get you 600
more unique visitors.
This last fact is obtained from simple observation of search
results on major search engines. If you search for any term on
most major search engines, you will notice that many of the top
ranking pages in the search results are the home pages of web
sites (i.e., the default page of a domain name, such as
index.htm, default.asp, index.html, etc). Also, the domain names
themselves often contain the keywords being searched for (e.g. a
search for wedding gowns will result in pages with domains such
as weddinggowns.com, weddingshop.com, gownsforsale.com, etc.).
This is especially so with HotBot (www.hotbot.com). That is not
to say that other pages do not rank well. It just means that
your pages will rank better if the domain name or the page name
contains the keywords being searched for.
Now that you have seen how absolutely logical and easy it is to
get that much needed traffic to your web site, you can now go
ahead and make it happen for you.
The only obstacle is one: to make a significantly higher number
of web pages than those that you currently have, and make these
for a wider variety of related keywords than you already have,
and optimize them all for the several major search engines, is
not exactly a simple task if done manually. The hardest part is
the optimization because that is a mathematical and constantly
changing thing (the engines use math to rank pages and they
constantly change their formulas).
There are several options available to you to make your work
easier.
You could find a consultant who does this. Usually, this is
quite expensive, but the advantage is that you do not have to do
anything yourself. You do have to be careful to choose a good
consultant and not just anyone trying their luck at this. Your
other option is to do it yourself. If you have a lot of time and
know-how of the workings of the search engines, you could make
templates and run them against your set of keywords to create
your pages. The only danger with templates is that you could end
up with duplicate pages that spam the engines. And this method
can be a messy process.
Your last and best option is to use software specifically
designed for this job. This is the fastest, most reliable and
accurate method. All you have to do is select the right software
package and everything else should take care of itself. This
field is very new and currently very few packages exist that
offer enough intelligence to do the job correctly. I use SPIDER
FOOD.
There are many other ways that people use to find new sites,
such as following links on other sites, reading about sites in
magazines, hearing from friends, etc. But no matter what other
methods they use, they almost always use them in addition to
using the search engines, especially when actively trying to
locate new information. If there was one thing you could not
eliminate from a site's success driver and not ruin it, it is
most usually its traffic from the search engines. No other
method of marketing is so powerful, effective, and affordable to
the majority of sites on the Internet. In fact, it is virtually
free.