Getting people to visit my website

Increase website traffic.

Increase website visitors.

Get more people.

Those 9 (nine) words plus the 6 (six) in the subject line are enough to guarantee this blog will get slammed by visitors in the next few days.

How do I know?

I’ve been experimenting. Alot.

Rewind back 3 years ago when I first started this particular  blog – it was the trendy thing to do here in Melbourne, Australia, because people were  expecting that if you knew what you were talking about in digital, you would put your money where your mouth was and write it up for all to see – and shoot at.

Like most blog writers I follow, I started this particular blog for a couple of reasons: a place to crystallise random thoughts; somewhere to park some business concepts and ideas I had been nurturing and not least of all, to play around with the key words and meta whatsits that live within these pages to see what effect they would have on traffic. Ostensibly this was for the benefit of my clients and to ensure ongoing continuity in my viable employment.

In recent months, I haven’t really touched this platform, because I’ve been busy playing dad to my 1  & 3 year olds, trying my best to be a good husband to my wonderful wife, selling the  family home and starting a new job. Been a bit busy really. However courtesy of my Blackberry, I’ve noticed my hosting traffic going into orbit, due in now small part to the  3 articles on:

1. The up and coming new McClaren MP412C car http://www.theculturemind.com/2009/07/mclaren-f1-reborn-2/
2. Cannondale Mountain Bikes http://www.theculturemind.com/2009/04/mountain-bike-cannondale/
3. Request for Tender (RFT) process. http://www.theculturemind.com/2011/02/the-perils-of-the-rft-rfp-rfq-eoi-pitch-process-for-business/

Now in all seriousness, these articles have absolutely nothing to do with each other aside from being within the same blog location/address. I won’t probably ever be able to afford a new McLaren (costing somewhere north of AUD $500,000), I actually ride Cannondale’s arch nemesis in a Specialized and RFT’s – well they can go blow – I hate them, as they are on the whole a ridiculous waste of time, not withstanding the fact I’m quite good at responding to them.

What twigged the traffic increase exponentially, was the fact I had to login and remove the pictures off the McClaren post, which I wrote 22+ months ago, because the visitor load was pinging my upper bandwidth. I logged in, removed the pictures and republished. The WordPress Platform, which I use to run this site, in its wisdom duly archived off my previous post and I got a brand new URL, which was annotated with a #2.

Curious, I Googled the article and lo and behold it pops up in the search results. Now here it gets interesting. The previous post was annoted “mclaren-f1-reborn” where as the new post was mclaren-f1-reborn-2/ . Within about 3 hours of me publishing the new post, sans pictures and with the #2, I thought, cool, I’ll drop the bandwidth from people finding the post, because its got a new URL. Wrong. My bandwidth trebled. Not pesky spider traffic either, but proper clicking visitors.

Fascinated, I changed the now pictureless post and re-added the original YouTube Video and republished. Further Increased traffic load.

Additional, basic things to add relevance and increase the site load for this post, which will guarantee extra traffic:

• post tags, correctly referencing search type terms
• cross links within the post to articles of note and reference articles
• cross links to external 3rd party websites, again of relevance
• actually writing an article that has relevance
• ensuring your URL is human readable and has hyphens/dashes – separating words and not spaces or %20 characters
• Using a title for the post which is relevant easily digestible

How Interesting.

SEO Seeding – Electronic Arts Website

What a fascinating (and logical) way to gain higher volume traffic to your newly designed website – Electronic Arts www.ea.com – jumped right onto the Ashton Kucher vs CNN battle, publishing this press release on 16th April 2009:

In supporting Ashton in his efforts, EA is offering Kutcher’s 1,000,000th follower on Twitter a copy of every game EA makes in 2009 for the gaming system of their choice and, to have a character based on them that can be played in The Sims 3 if Ashton wins.  The Sims 3 will also donate 5,000 mosquito nets in the name of the 1 millionth person who follows Ashton on Twitter (REGARDLESS of a win).

Earlier this week, actor Ashton Kutcher announced via YouTube that the number of his Twitter account followers rivaled that of the CNN Breaking News Twitter feed, and that upon beating them to the 1 million member milestone, he would punk CNN founder Ted Turner if the Internet made it happen.  (Click here to watch the video that started it all.)

Specifically, he said he would ding-dong ditch Ted Turner’s house and post the video of it if he won the showdown.  To sweeten the deal, Ashton also promised to donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity for World Malaria Day on April 24.

Check out this update on EA’s offer by Ashton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma8AcfKGaEI

Follow EA on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/EA
Follow EA on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/ea
Follow EA on FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/EA/68678914189
Follow The Sims 3 on Twitter: http://twitter.com/thesims3
Join the race to be Ashton Kutcher’s millionth follower: http://twitter.com/aplusk

The above content, whilst short and succinct, hits every hallmark of good SEO & wider marketing/public relations:

• Keywords – Ashton Kutcher, CNN, Twitter, were some of the hottest search words around at that point in time. Relevance.
• Cross linking to high volume, highly spidered sites like www.wikipedia.org and www.youtube.com and linking to the cross promotion points on Twitter & Facebook and EA’s own Twitter pages
• Inserting the title [Sims 3] of a game which in itself is under high search keyword scrutiny and offering the coveted position of having an avatar of yourself created in one of the most popular games of of ALL time – the modern day equivalent of immortality personified – i.e. the 100 story skyscraper, with your name on the plaque at the bottom.
• EA throwing in themselves and donating 5,000 mosquito nets in the name of the millionth follower to the www.malarianomore.org campaign. Another chance of immortality and celebrity.
• The incidental prize of all 2009 EA Titles, is really just appeasing the products division – on the weight of the other PR & promotional activity, this pales in significance.

Full coverage and the new EA site here:

EA Supports Ashton Kutcher in Twitter Showdown - http://www.ea.com/news/ea-supports-ashton-kutcher-in-twitter-showdown
Malaria No More - http://www.malarianomore.org/news/features/twitter_aplusk.php

And for the record, I personally prefer the look of the older EA site…. the new white background is a sorry trade off for the cool black of the preceding site, although funtionality wise, the execution of the new site is outstanding. Maybe it’s because I spend alot of time looking at MS Word doco on the screen today, my poor eyes prefer the soft tones of black….