How to drive traffic to your website

The Internet gives you access to a worldwide audience; if only they can find you. Discover how to increase search engine traffic to your pages—on Websites, blogs and forums—by understanding and writing about what people are searching for

Recently I was involved in an exercise to identify a new content management system (CMS) for a Web-based business.

As part of that, I investigated search engine rankings, what drives search-based traffic to Websites and, more importantly, why content fails to get good search traffic. This piece is a direct outcome of that effort.

To improve search-based traffic to your Website or blog or forum, you need to work at two levels—at the server level, in the structure, makeup and design of your content management system, and at the article level, in the way an individual piece is written. Both are equally important. This is written from the writer’s perspective: How to write articles or pieces that can attract good search engine traffic. This is not about search engine optimization (SEO), which is a specialized profession in itself. I am talking about what the writer needs to do to improve search engine traffic to her or his pieces.

On the Net, traffic comes from three sources. The first lot is fans of the particular site or the author, those who know your site or even you by name and come in directly. The second are those who come to your piece following links to it from other sites. And the third are those who are directed to the particular piece by search engines. For a decent site, traffic from a search engine should be at least a third to a half, if not more, of all traffic.

Search engine traffic does not come to a site as a whole, or only to its home page. It comes to specific pages within the site. Collectively, all such pages drive the site traffic up. It is up to the individual articles (and not the site as a whole) to draw search engine traffic. So, it is important that every piece at a site be able to draw its share of traffic from the search engines.

In the days of the printed word, getting the reader to pick up the piece was not your job as the writer. That was for the media buyer in case of an ad or for the circulation department in the case of magazines and newspapers. In today’s search engine centric world, that power vests with you, the writer. Good search engine rankings and search traffic is as much a function of how the site is structured and managed as it is of how the individual articles are written. In fact, there is only so much that administrator-level tricks can do. More power lies in the hands of the individual authors.

How search engines send traffic to your page
To write articles that get better search traffic, we need to understand how traffic comes from search engines in the first place.

The process starts when someone, like you or me, types in a search phrase into a search engine like Google or Yahoo. The engine looks into its database of pages to see which ones have that word or phrase in them. The engine then displays these articles in a particular order. It is important to get your article up front in response to relevant searches and also to get it displayed higher up, to increase clickthroughs.

This is the key to higher search engine traffic to your article.

Simply put, the keywords that people are searching for have to be there in your piece for it to show up in the results. The more of the keywords you have, the more frequently you have them and the earlier in the article you have them, the better your chance for showing up early in the search results. Here, it is important to note that if you fake it, that is, if you use keywords that are not relevant to the piece or stuff your piece just with keywords, search engines can penalize (blacklist) not just the article, but the entire site. And getting out of a search engine blacklist is time- and resource-consuming and often frustrating.

What phrases should you use?
How do you choose what phrases to use? Before you write even a word of the article, stop, and ask yourselves a few critical questions.

First, who do you want to read your piece (here think function, not designation or role)?

What all designations are they likely to go by (if you are writing about a professional issue)?

If they are searching on the subject you are writing about, what words will come to their mind? What words or phrases are they likely to type into the search box? Write down these words and phrases on a fresh clean page.

What other topics are closely related to your topic? Add them to your list.

Which famous people are or can be associated with your topic? Add them to your list.

Which current hot news item has potential links to your topic? Add them to your list.

Now these last two, famous people and hot news item may be a bit difficult, if you are writing about say a new technology development, but it is worth a try.

Your challenge is to incorporate all that is scribbled on your sheet of paper in your article. The rest of this piece introduces you to the methodologies and tools for achieving this.

Is your topic popular enough?
Not all topics are equally popular. While Paris Hilton and iPhone will draw huge search traffic, not all of us are fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your point of view) to be writing about them all the time. But within our domains, we can help our own cause by choosing or associating with topics that are more popular.

Take, for example, a business that advises on IT strategy that is writing on its webpage or blog. According to wordtracker.com, “IT strategy” and the top 100 related keywords for example, gets daily search traffic of 206 searches, while “business strategy” and its associated top 100 keywords yield 1,296 searches per day. “Marketing strategy” is even better placed with 3,154 searches per day. “CIO strategy,” on the other hand, fared miserably with just two searches (the exact phrase used, seemed to indicate a job search) per day.

So, if you are writing for key IT decision makers, from a search traffic point of view, (if not from an actual business point of view) it makes ample sense to correlate what you are writing to marketing and business challenges and strategies, and not just limit yourselves to the terms CIO strategy or IT strategy. In this example, using just “CIO strategy” in your piece can be plain disastrous from a search traffic perspective.

So, how do you navigate these troubled waters? What about a piece on supporting the use of the iPhone as part of the IT strategy, to provide a sharper edge to the marketing strategy and the overall business strategies? Or if you do not want to stretch that far, what about one on the disruptive influence of devices like the iPhone on traditional IT strategies?

Would this approach bring irrelevant search traffic? Let me ask a counter question: would the traffic be any more irrelevant than the one person who came searching for a job through the term CIO strategy?

When do people search?
Search is seasonal. What is hot today will be forgotten tomorrow, and new terms and phrases will keep search engines busy as new people, new movies, new games, new products and new scandals make it to the top of the collective consciousness.

Take, for example, my earlier example of the iPhone, which was launched in June 2007. This graph shows the trend for iPhone as a search keyword in Google. What is interesting is that the absolute peak in searches was six months before the launch of the product!