This is an archived article to see the current version visit http://www.timothyfish.net/Article.asp?ID=44.
There are a couple of ways to increase the amount of traffic flowing to a website. One method is to have lots of backlinks to the site. The other is to have lots of content. Both of these methods are necessary, but one will work better than the other in different situations.
A backlink is a link from another site. People surf the web by jumping from link to link, so for someone to find a website there must be at least one link from another site. Having more links increases the chances that a person will find the site.
Some websites rely almost entirely on backlinks to drive traffic to a single page or only a few pages. You might see this setup when a new movie is being promoted. There may not be a whole lot that can be said about the movie, but with backlinks from high ranking sites and enough public interest in the movie, the site will get plenty of traffic. There really is no need for more content.
Building backlinks is a scheme that is often used by webmasters who have little to say but think the whole world ought to see it. There are sites that will add links for free, there are sites that will add links in exchange for a link and there are sites that will add links for a fee. There are some sites that are looking for articles. These articles are usually submitted by webmasters or people with websites as a way to increase the number of links that there are to their website. It takes more effort, but an article with a link is usually worth more than just a link on a site that has thousands of links.
One thing that should not be overlooked is the content on the website. Suppose you have a website that really isn’t very highly ranked in the search engine results, but it does show up. Now suppose this website has ten pages. Half of these pages are receiving one hit a month on average. The rest are much more sporadic. Let’s say that the website is getting seven hits a month. It is hardly the example of a popular website, but some church websites get no more than that.
Before we consider what to do about this situation, let’s look at what might cause this. A lack of backlinks might be the cause, but with some churches backlinks won’t help a whole lot. Church websites are usually focused on one local area. If there are not a lot of people in that local area, there won’t be a lot of people looking for the things that are of interest to that church. Backlinks might increase the number of people living outside the area who visit the site, but it will do nothing for increasing the popularity of the site within the local area.
The general information that is contained on a church website is not vastly popular even in a densely populated area. It is not often that people want to know the schedule of service, the ministries a church has, the name of the pastor or any of the other things that are always on a church website. Even if a thousand people need this information at some point, it is unlikely that they will all need it in the same month. It is also unlikely that they will need it more than once or twice. Let’s face it, some of the information that is placed on a church website is just not all that interesting.
Since the content that is placed on the church website is almost guaranteed to have low traffic volume, increasing traffic requires increasing the amount of content on the site. Since our hypothetical website is getting seven hits a month, just by increasing the number of pages content to twenty will increase the traffic to fourteen hits per month. If there are two hundred pages then we might expect that there will be 140 hits per month.
Determining how much traffic a site will have based on the number of pages it contains is not as simple as multiplying by the number of pages. Increasing pages in the site can increase the number of links to some pages, so those pages may end up being ranked higher in the search engine results. Some of the existing pages may have backlinks that the new pages will not. This may mean that the added pages will not be as popular. Even so, more content means that people have more reasons to visit the site. Some people who have visited the site for one reason might come back to the site for another reason. So even if your town only has one hundred people who would ever visit the church website, these people might visit the site several times if they have a reason to do so.
One way that some people use to increase the content on a website is to either grab it from another website. Some websites make content available to other websites. Another way is to allow visitors to the site to post content. Still another way is just randomly generate text that will show up in search engines and serve as a gateway to the site. These methods will sometimes work, but they are not the best and can do more harm than good. Some search engines may look for some of these schemes and actually reduce a site’s ranking or even ban the site if it appears the site is using practices that are designed to increase the site’s ranking without providing relevant content.
It is hard work and it takes longer, but the best way to increase traffic with content is to provide new content. Some of this may come from other sources, but the site should have plenty of articles that are unique to the site. When someone visits the site, the person should be able to find something that he can’t find anywhere else. If there is enough unique information then the site will see an increase in traffic.
Even though it is possible to increase traffic with lots of articles that are rarely read, it is better to look for topics in which several people are interested. It takes less time to write an article that one hundred people will read than it takes to write ten articles that ten people will read.