Search Engine Optimization

Chapter 3. Driving Traffic to a Site

The first goal of SEO is to draw traffic to a site. But traffic is drawn to sites that are good. So let’s take a look at two perspectives on what kind of content draws traffic.

First, a web site worth practicing SEO upon should be a worthy beneficiary: a site with content that at least theoretically has the ability to draw traffic.

Second, one SEO technique—in the absence of this worthy content—is to create it from scratch. So bear in mind that creating content to draw traffic is one of the most effective—and simplest—SEO techniques. As such, it’s worth having a look at content that draws traffic.

Tip

Most sites need to present breadth—meaning many pages that are organized cohesively. A site that presents a single web page is unlikely to present sufficient depth of content to justify extensive SEO.

The SEO trick is to draw traffic with desirable content, then to “seduce” the traffic into portions of the site that may not directly have anything to do with the content—this is the ultimate goal of the SEO campaign.

Content That Draws Traffic

There’s a great deal of variation in good—successful—content web sites. The purpose of these sites varies from humor to practical to editorial opinions and beyond. It’s hard to generalize. But successful content sites typically do tend to fall into at least one (maybe more than one) of the following categories:

• The site is humorous, and makes visitors laugh. While humor is a matter of personal taste, and varies tremendously ...