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 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.
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