I’ve noticed a real spike in traffic to my more established sites over the last few months, and oddly it’s not related to anything I’ve done recently, but has much more to do with content I developed more than 6-months ago, in some cases much older than that.
For instance, my main Online Marketing Reseource Site contains an article and newsletter archive directory that holds thousands of articles from the last 4-5 years.
Now, when I ripped apart my statistics recently we noticed that there are a half-dozen articles that have achieved top 3 ranking for very competitive keywords. The real kicker…
The most recent article is more than 6-months old! One of the articles was written back in 2004. I’ve also noticed an online web site valuation tool (I’m often skeptical with these since nobody really knows what sort of black magic is being applied and they do nothing to take into account monetization strategies other than advertising). However, after plugging in many of my sites into this tool, it was clear a great deal of emphasis is being placed on maturity – how long the site has been around. So what’s all this mean for you?
4 things really.
1. Content is once again playing a very important role in overall choice of how to get traffic to your site. As PPC gets more and more outrageous, advertising gets costlier and content is once again king to the search engines, you can’t ignore it’s important to your business.
2. Since a major factor in ranking your content, and therefore how many eyeballs will eventually see your site and content, has to do with maturity – build your site right NOW! Even if your product is not ready, or you are not 100% sure about the design of your site, get your site up, and begin writing content each and everyday. Write reviews, an opinion, an article, a case study, an observation, anything to do with your market. My findings have been that your content will get you almost instant traffic, but will get better with age. The sooner you start, the more traffic you will get.
3. Be smart about targeting keyword phrases commonly used by those who desire your product. You can use keyword analysis tools, your own brainstorming, Pay-per-click statistics and best of all, your own web statistics to see how people are finding your site. Trust me, you will be amazed that so many people may type a 4-5 word phrase to get to your information.
4. Consider ways to improve your search engine ranking including:
– Getting links from more established sites that already have authority
– Using blogs and social networking sites that are the current darlings of the search engines
– Keep your eye on sites forsale that have good history, but may not have a solid business plan behind them
You can benefit immediately from their search engine placement
Bottom line folks, if you are procrastinating, unsure of what online business to get into, what products to sell, how to make money online, what sort of site you should design – just start writing. It’s more important that you get something up and start generating content. You can always re-organize and re-design your site later, but start now so you have some serioius search engine rankings in the next few months.
Just like a fine wine, your content will age with time and get you more and more traffic – turning that traffic into dollars is the easy part, so get started generating traffic today.
Jeff
