DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

Talk to any SEO expert and they will inundate you with talk on how getting the right set of keywords is the most import thing in driving search engine traffic to your site.

There are atleast three other factors that have a larger say in determining your website traffic.

1. Frequency of updates

This is the most important one.  More important than any keyword based strategy. Search engines tend to degrade the  ranks of content that is older, while moving up fresher content. So, if you want a lot of search engine traffic on your site, then you need to ensure that the content on your site is frequently updated; preferably many times a day.

There is some empirical evidence that if the updates appear on the home page, then they are likely to drive more search engine traffic than if they appear in some inside page. Possibly, search engines give more weightage to content that is on the front page than to that on the inside.

2. A wide range of keywords

Most SEO experts work with a narrow set of keywords.  The problem with working with a narrow set of keywords is that you loose out on what I call potential peripheral (pp) traffic. PP traffic is traffic that has a peripheral interest in your website and what it has to offer, but is not even aware of its existence.

With most websites, actual traffic is just a minuscule percentage of the pp traffic. Lets say your website is all about music and your SEO experts have done a great job of optimising it for keywords in the music domain. Now, there are those with a great interest in painting, and also a passing interest in music. Given their abiding interest in painting, they are likely to search using paintng related keywords and completely miss your site. How do you get them to your site? Obviously, you need to have content (and keywords) that link music and painting. 

It is not for nothing that sites like wikipedia that are rich with a huge range of keywords rank high in search engine results.

3.  Too much of search engine traffic is not a good thing

At first sight, this statement may sound strange and untrue, but it is not.

The traffic that comes to your site can broadly be classified into five sources.

a. Direct traffic -  those who are familiar with your site and come directly by typing in a URL in their browser

b. Search engine traffic - Those who find your site as a result of a search

c.  Social media traffic - those who are led to your pages by links in twitter, digg and so on.

d. Emailer traffic - Those who clicked on links in your emailers.

e. Referred traffic -Those who click on links to your site at other sites.

You need to have a good balance of traffic from these various sources. If anything, it should be slightly skewed towards direct traffic. Else, what it means is that your returning traffic is very low; that those who come to you because they know you is very low. In that case, you will have to keep on spending time and energy to keep traffic going at current levels, instead of devoting those resources to build new audiences.