Increasing Website Traffic

Customer sometimes ask me the question 'What can I do to get more traffic?'? A lot think that as I update their websites for them there's probably little that they can do. But they are very much wrong. I'd like to touch on what can be done today, and maybe give more ideas tomorrow.

One customer, a very early customer in fact, has a nice little site about his Spanish Catfishing Holidays. Right from the start he wanted me to run and maintain a photo gallery and throughout the fishing season he sends me regular updates with new pictures. It doesn't take me long to resize these and add them to his gallery page, something that I do as part of his annual maintenance.

This means that his site has maintained a page rank 3 not just for it's home page but across all main pages. And John has told me that he receives plenty of search engine traffic. In fact, when his friend (and competitor) wanted their site updated a few weeks ago, he recommended that they speak to us.

With this site we didn't make any changes to the style, just to code and tweaked it for search engine optimisation. We then added their own Spanish Catfishing Pictures page, which I hope he'll be providing me plenty of pictures for.

To add new pictures, you don't need to be adding them all individually. Another customer sent us a huge batch of pictures 2 weeks ago for her site so we created a Dog Walker Gallery for her. Rather than include all of the pictures at once, I resized all of them ready for use but the code limits how many it actually displays. This limit increases so that 2 new pictures are included on the page each month. Along with the photograph's description, it means that the dog owners and search engines alike can return to see what is new.

And finally a third way I handled this on a website was with a Picture Framer site that I published not too long ago. He produces frames for anything you can imagine and also sells various postcards of local views that he wanted to show off. So in a similar way to the dog walker website I scanned and prepared all of the pictures, but this time we only show the 'postcard of the month'. The idea was mainly to attract people to return to the website, but it also means that page is regularily updated with a new picture, which should keep the search engines interested as well.

Using pictures is a great way of keeping content fresh. The search engines cannot see the actual picture, but I'm sure that they notice the file names changing. If you include a brief description of the picture then they will definitely notice that.

This means that visitors have something to come back for (holiday makers return to see their picture on the website and to show it to their friends) creating traffic and people emailing links for your website. And this is really what you want. The search engine benefit follows because what you are doing is great for your visitors.