The key to increased website traffic
         By : Donald Nelson  
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        Everyone wants to have a lot of traffic to their website. In order
        to get this traffic many people try to work on their meta tags or
        even do tricks trying to get more visitors to their website. One of
        the simplest and most solid ways to increase the flow of traffic
        to your website is to offer more content. It has often been said
        that on the Internet, content is king. It is important to understand
        how more content can bring more visitors to your site and how
        to generate content that is related to your particular web site.

        Why do you need more content?

        Many websites are actually company brochures that have been
        adapted to the web. They merely describe a bit about the
        company or service and then add some contact information.
        Such websites usually have about 5-10 separate html files.
        If these pages have a good amount of text it is possible to
        optimize them for several keywords and web surfers may find
        the site.

        However, if these sites are in highly competitive fields then it
        may be difficult to build a decent amount of traffic because
        search engines try to find the most important web sites that can
        answer a search query. Search engine robots look for key-
        words in the meta tags and in the text on the pages to
        determine what the site is all about. However the search
        engines also look at the links on the various pages. If your main
        page is about bicycles, for example, and you have links to other
        pages on your site relating to the same theme, perhaps, racing
        bicycles, mountain bicycles etc. then the search engine will
        conclude that the site is about bicycles, and if you have a lot of
        pages on this theme, your site should rank higher than
        someone with a company brochure site of a few pages.

        In addition, as I have pointed out in a previous article
        (http://www.a1-optimization.com/deep-submission.com), each
        page, with its content on your particular theme, stands out
        alone as a mini website in itself and may come up in searches
        on the Internet. Thus people will often enter your site through the
        "side" or "back doors" and not the main page. The more pages
        you have the more chances of being found in searches, and the
        more different keywords you can optimize your site for.

        So, by building a content rich site on a particular theme, you will
        boost the chances of your main page to come up in searches
        and you will increase the likelihood of overall traffic through your
        other pages coming up in good positions in Internet keyword
        searches. In addition to this, the more content you have the
        more respect your page gets from human-edited directories
        (such as dmoz -Open Directory Project), and other 
        webmasters. If you have quality content then you swill get more
        link requests, requests for permission to reprint your articles in
        ezines, more links to specific pages on your site. All of this will
        result in more traffic.

        How to build more content?

        Depending on the type of products or services you are offering,
        there are several ways to build quality content for your site. Here
        are a few examples

        Product Reviews - If you are selling other peoples products,
        through an affiliate system, rather than just listing a link to the
        product, you can write a full review of the product, explaining
        how the product helped you and what are its strengths and
        weaknesses. This kind of content actually pre-sells the product,
        as well as being interesting reading in itself. If you have your
        own products you could give background information on it or
        get satisfied customers or users to write the reviews. 

        Background information - Every product or service exists in
        some kind of context. Suppose you have a hotel in a particular
        city. Instead of only listing information about your hotel, you
        could give some pages about the history of the city where the
        hotel is located or information about popular tourist attractions
        in that area. The possibilities are enormous.

        Questions and Answers - Let your web visitors help you in the
        process of content creation. Start a questions and answers
        section on your website or in your electronic newsletter. Not
        only will you get insight into what your clientele is thinking, but by
        answering these questions you will generate useful content for
        your site and for your newsletters.

        Bulletin Board Forums - Your web visitors can also directly write
        the content on your site through a bulletin board. Some bulletin
        boards are searchable by search engine robots, while others
        are not. If you have good content on the bulletin board you can 
        also re-publish it on the main sections of your website to insure
        inclusion in the search engines.

        Articles by others - There is no need to recreate the wheel or
        spend a lot of time writing, if that is not your cup of tea! You can
        also publish the articles of other people. There is a lot of quality
        content that is available free of charge. While you usually have
        to provide a link back to the author of the article, this is a small
        price to pay considering that some of these articles may pull in
        tons of traffic.

        Finally, if you are wondering how to arrange the increased
        content you have two main options. Some people actually build
        a second content-rich website to draw traffic and then direct
        visitors to their sales site. Another possibility is to add an
        articles section to your existing site, or simply to link the new
        pages to the particular product and service pages that are
        appropriate. Whichever option you choose, you can expect to
        see an increased flow of traffic as a result of the quality content
        that you have added to your website.
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        Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker.
        He has been working on the Internet since 1995, and is
        currently the director of A1-Optimization
        (http://www.a1-optimization.com), a firm providing low cost
        search engine optimization, submission and web promotion
        services