Why lots of quality content is the key to lots of traffic.
Content - All webmasters want lots of it and need lots of it to get a lot of traffic to their websites. In order to boost traffic, many webmasters try work on their meta tags or even resort to tricks in an effort to get more visitors to their site.
But one of the simplest, most effective, and most dependable ways to increase the amount of traffic to your website is to offer more quality content. I'm sure you have heard it said that on the Internet, content is king. Well, it's true!
For your website to be successful, you need to understand exactly how more content brings more visitors to your site as well as how to generate quality content that is related to your particular website theme.
Why do you need more content to bring in lots of traffic?
Many websites are really just company brochures that have been placed on the web. The site simply describes the company, with some contact information thrown in.
These types of websites usually have anywhere from five to ten separate html files. If these pages have a moderate amount of text on them, it's possible to optimize them for a few keywords and a few web surfers may find the site via the search engines.
But if these sites are in fairly competitive fields, it may be very difficult to build enough traffic because the search engines try to rank the most important websites that match a search query. Search engine robots search for keywords or phrases in the pages' text to try to determine what the site is all about.
But the search engines also consider the links on the web pages. For example, if your homepage is about bicycles and you have links to other pages on your site relating to the same theme, such as mountain bikes, racing bikes, etc, then the search engine will conclude that the site is about bicycles.
So if your site has a lot of pages about bicycles, your site will be better represented in the search engines for the search term bicycles than one that is simply a bicycle company brochure site with a handful of pages.
Also, each page stands alone as a "mini website" and may come up in searches, allowing people to enter your site through the "side" or "back doors" and not the homepage. The more pages your site has, the more chances it has of being found in searches, and the more you can optimize your site for different search terms.
In a nutshell, more pages mean more "roads" from the search engines to your sites. And traffic needs roads to travel on.
So then, by adding lots of quality content pages to your site, you boost the chances of one of your pages coming up in searches and you will increase your site's overall traffic.
Another thing to consider: the more quality content your site has, the more respect it gets from human-edited directories such as the Open Directory Project as well as from other webmasters.
If you have lots of quality content, then you'll get lots of link requests, requests for permission to publish your articles in newsletters, and more links to content pages on your website. All of these factors result in more website traffic for you.
How do you get lots of quality content for your site?
Depending on the type of products or services you offer, there are many ways to build quality content for your site. Here are a few examples:
1. Product Reviews - If you are selling other companys' products as an affiliate, rather than just linking to the product, you can write a full-page review of it. Explain how the product has helped you and what its strengths are.
This type of content pre-sells the product, as well as providing interesting reading in itself. If you sell your own products, you can give background information on them or solicit satisfied customers or users to write reviews, or testimonials.
2. Background information - Every product exists in some context. For example, you may have a hotel in a particular city. Instead of only providing information about the hotel, you could offer some content pages about the history of the city where the hotel is located as well as any popular tourist attractions near there. The possibilities for adding this type of content are unlimited!
3. Questions and answers - Let your website's visitors help you create content. Place a questions and answers feature on your website or in your newsletter. Not only will you get insight into what is on your visitor's minds, but by answering these questions you can generate lots of useful content for your website and newsletters.
4. Forums - Your site's visitors can also directly write the content on your site through a forum. Some forums are searchable by search engine robots, while others aren't. If you have quality content on your forum, you can also cut-and-paste it onto the main pages of your website to ensure inclusion in the large search engines.
5. Guest articles by others - There's no real need to spend a lot of time writing your own articles if that isn't something that you enjoy doing (or of you aren't very good at it). You can publish the articles that other people write!
There's a lot of top-quality free content that is available on the internet. While you're usually required to provide a link back to the author's website (or give his/her email address), this is a small price to pay when you consider the fact that many of these well-written articles pull in tons of traffic.
Finally, if you're wondering how best to arrange all of your site's new content, you have two effective options. Some people may simply build a second content-rich website to draw lots of traffic and then direct the visitors to their main "sales site" via links.
My preferred method is to place an articles section on your existing site, or simply link your new content pages to the particular product and service pages that are most appropriate.
However you decide to present your content, you can expect to see a greatly increased traffic flow to your site as a direct result of the quality content that you have added.
About the Author: Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor, and social worker. Visit him at http://www.a1-optimization.com
