The Most Important Ingredient for Driving Traffic to Your Website
There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, but what would you say is the most important?
In my opinion, the most important ingredient is content. Yes, there are a lot of other things to consider such as links, site map, directory placement, search engine optimization, networking, advertising - not all of which I subscribe to - the most important is content. If you ensure your site is filled with rich, quality content, the traffic will come on its own. It will be targetted traffic, and it will be free.
Why is content so important for a website? Let me illustrate. Say you write a website about apples. Someone else write about apples also. However, not only does he write about apples, he also has articles in his website about red apples, green apples, apple diseases, apple trees, propagating apples, fertiliser for apple trees, apple recipes, and so on. Now, which website will be found more easily by the search engine? Naturally, that person's website. If someone is looking for green apples on the web, the search engine will list his site. Apple diseases? His site. Apple recipes? His site. If your content is insufficient, you will have a longer wait before someone finds your website. Not only that, there will be fewer people finding you, because your scope is too narrow.
Think of the search engine like a friendly dog, and content like treats for the dog. If you give the friendly dog lots of treats, it will come back again and again. And it will reward you by bringing lots of traffic to you. However, if you don't put lots of contents on your website, then the friendly dog will not find any reason to stay at your site. It will go off to another site where it finds lots of treats.
Before you rush off to pump lots of content into your website, please, hang on for one more minute. It's not enough to simply pump in content. You have to ensure that your content is rich and of good quality. Taking the apples website as example, nobody would be interested if your site is about you having apples for breakfast, apple pie for lunch, and so on. Face it, on the web, you don't matter. People don't go to the website looking to find out about you. If someone goes to the search engine and types in "apple pie for lunch", perhaps he will find you. But the information you provide is not important to him. People use the search engine to look for information. They are not interested in you. So it is information that you must provide. If you have to write about "apple pie for lunch", then think of all the reasons people would search for "apple pie for lunch", and write your content to fulfill their need. Then they will regard your website as a useful, content-rich website. And the next time they want to look for something related to apples, they will come back again. They will tell their friends. Pretty soon, people who are interested in the subject of apples will link to your site. And you'll see your traffic grow, without you having to do anything.
At Site Build It, they use a term "pre-Sell" to describe the act of writing rich content. Write this Site Build It article, Make Your Content PreSell to read more about it.
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