Should I create more content to get more traffic?

Creating more content on your site is probably the ‘easiest’ way to build more traffic to your website. The reason is that every single bit of content you create will be indexed by search engines and, over time, your new unique content will start to rank well for lots of (usually long tail) search queries.

But at first glance it can actually seem rather daunting! I hear you… ‘Build more pages and content? You’ve got to be kidding! I’m running a business and I just don’t have time!’

But sometimes it’s easier than you think.

Before I get to some expensive but powerful options, let’s look at the way our good friends at our very own SmartCompany have achieved it without too much effort at all. They’ll correct me if I’m wrong.

You’ll notice at the bottom of each SmartCompany article, there are related ‘tags’:

When you click on one of the links, you’re taken to a search results page showing all other related content on the SmartCompany site which has the same tags or is keyword related.

What’s really neat about the system they’ve adopted is the fact that they’re assisting not just humans, but search engine robots that crawl the search results pages of the site, which creates more pages a search engine can index.

Here’s the ranking position for the above search term and search results page at Google. Not bad.

See, the problem a search engine robot has is that it can’t type queries into a search bar on your site. Search engine robots are quite dumb like that.

So by creating search tags, you can help the robots generate and index your search pages. And for SmartCompany this has meant an additional 9,400 pages being indexed by Google. Good effort guys. Hats off.

Recently a new client showed me some other interesting sites doing similar things, such as Getprice and Dick Smith Electronics.

Getprice has an astounding 19 million pages indexed by Google. That’s one hell of an xml sitemap (or 38 individual sitemaps to be more precise).

They’ve done this using some pretty sophisticated programming to auto-generate pages on their site for literally millions of search terms. Spammy and undoubtedly expensive, but effective.

Dick Smith has utilised a great piece of technology from Sli-systems where (in a nut-shell) each time someone uses the search bar, the system actually builds a static ‘results’ page for search engines to index. Very intelligent, but perhaps a little on the expensive side for most of us.

For Dick Smith, this has meant an additional 8,400 pages indexed, and there are more added every time someone performs a new search.

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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