Single Best Way to Generate Website Traffic?

How to generate website traffic? Several years ago, there were so called “traffic generators” which were supposed to bring surges of traffic to your website with a push of a button. And the way they did that was to automatically generate thousands of pages for your site which were then supposed to be indexed by search engines and result in traffic from long tail keyword searches. Apparently that worked.

But it doesn’t work now because the search engines got “smarter” and they treat duplicate content differently. But what if those thousands of pages were unique enough for not to be grouped into segments? That’s what I decided to find out.

It’s a common belief that if you write content, traffic will come, even if you don’t do keyword research or any search engine optimization, nor use any other means to get traffic. Content is supposed to attract visitors by itself. And it is true… The only problem is that the amount of traffic is closely related to the amount of content, or rather different pages.

I’ve ran a couple of experiments in different niches to see how the content affects traffic. I’ve set up little blogs and began posting every day, making really short posts but lots of them. And lo and behold, the traffic began coming in from various obscure long tail keywords. 10, 20, 30 visits a day, and with a clear trend upwards.

I’ve  run another a lot more aggressive test and with a little bit of keyword research. I’ve set up an auto blog that would aggregate feeds of the keywords from Google’s latest trends. It has slowly gained traffic from 100s to up to 5k unique visits per day. Then it was slapped by Google, as I would have expected to happen to such an aggressive experiment.

Even though these experiments may not be very statistically significant, I have enough proof that content indeed attracts traffic, especially if you do at least some minor keyword research. The only problem is that it requires you to create hundreds a lot of pages of rather unique content. The only relief is that those pages don’t have to be very content rich – one of my blogs only had a picture and a single sentence for each post.

The conclusion would be the following:

• Content really attracts traffic.
• To get more traffic you need more pages.
• The pages don’t have to be very content rich.

How to use this practically?

• If you have a blog, consider writing shorter but more posts.
• If you don’t have a blog on your website, add one – it’s a great way to add more content.
• Consider user generated content – comments, ratings, reviews, bookmarks, forums, pictures, videos and so on.

All this may not be new to you, but what I mean to do with this post is to draw your attention to what is rather forgotten. Many times I’m guilty myself of paying all my attention to SEO, PPC and other ways to get traffic and forget what potential the website has by itself. You don’t have to look for the traffic generators far, there’s on already built into your website!