There are many things you can do to get more visitors to your website, and attract more attention. Some are more important than others... here are my top five (based on over 10 years of web development experience, and running five top-million websites (according to Alexa):
1. Relevant, well-written content
People will link more to content that is well-written or fulfills a need. Then not only do you receive direct traffic from someone else's website, Google picks up on the fact that other people are linking to your content, and your content will have a higher ranking in search results (so, more search traffic as well). Continue Reading »
Make your information searchable, accessible, and reader-friendly... this is from a post on archstldev.com:
If you perform a web search via Google, or in the search engine on any website in the world, your search is done using simple words, like "bishop st. louis." A search engine must be able to see words like these in your pages if you want people to find your pages.
You need to have written text on the page (copied and pasted, or typed on the website) if you want people to be able to search for your information, and if you want people to be able to easily read and share your information.
Today I had to make some updates to the Archdiocese of Saint Louis' Leadership page. While I was making the updates, I noticed a pattern on the page that was very ineffective in terms of giving proper keyword metadata to Google for page links.
For each leader in the Archdiocese, there was a link to "Read more..." at the end of the leader's description. Google and other spiders take that 'Read more' text and expect it to mean something, so they give a little weight (but not much) to the words 'read' and 'more' when searched in tandem with content on the page the words link to.
However, to give Google more context, and to let our pages get a tiny bit of extra link juice, I linked the names of the leaders directly to their pages (instead of 'Read more' referring to Archbishop Robert J. Carlson, now 'Archbishop' 'Robert' 'J' and 'Carlson' refer to him!):
This tells Google that it can disregard the 'Read more...' link, and lets Google instead use the more contextually-sound link (with SEO terms built in).
Apparently, the Google Bot is quite happy when your a website offers a constantly updating home page - to the tune of 1,000+ page hits per day! Catholic News Live has received an average of 13,000 page views per week from the Google Bot since it's launch two weeks ago... meaning it has had a field day updating content from the site, and finding stories from Catholic blogs and news sites. It seems the bot checks in at least once an hour.
What does this mean for you, lowly webmaster? Well, if you can get your feed on Catholic News Live, you can get the Google Bot to index an inbound link (which does NOT have any kind of rel="nofollow" attribute, so you get some link juice from Google) pretty much every time you post a story. That can be pretty valuable if you want your posts to show up on Google quickly!
(An aside – Link Juice, in case you were wondering, is what we refer to when talking about the whole idea of Google pagerank and inbound link 'votes' - Google uses inbound links from legitimate and established websites to determine whether your site (the site linked to) appears higher in its rankings for certain search terms. More on SEO to come - for now, do some Google searches on the topic...).
There are many things you can do to get more visitors to your website, and attract more attention. Some are more important than others... here are my top five (based on over 10 years of web development experience, and running five top-million websites (according to 
Apparently, the Google Bot is quite happy when your a website offers a constantly updating home page - to the tune of 1,000+ page hits per day! Catholic News Live has received an average of 13,000 page views per week from the Google Bot since it's launch two weeks ago... meaning it has had a field day updating content from the site, and finding stories from Catholic blogs and news sites. It seems the bot checks in at least once an hour.
