Your website is a living, breathing organism on the internet that always needs some tender love and care. A lot of people will just start it up, and once the website gets going and the programmer is done coding, they think it will just drive itself home. But that’s like thinking that you only have to fill your car with gas once. The fact of the matter is that you need more than just time to increase your website traffic. It’s an investment that takes some serious attention, and if treated right, can end up paying some serious dividends.

New Content Means More Indexing

The way search engines work is run by the basic principle of “relevance”. The results of your search subject will be listed in content by relevance to the topic at hand. The way search engines like Google find out what applies to specific topics are through bots called “crawlers” or “spiders”. Googleuses its own program called Googlebot, a software that “crawls” through the web analyzing and indexing new and updated information. If you leave your website alone long enough, there is nothing new for the bot to crawl through, leaving it without anything to index. That ends up dropping your website down the totem pole in the order of relevant subjects related to search topics, which means your site will see less and less traffic until you have a stagnant page that will need to regain the momentum.

Keep Up With The Trends

If your website is still relating to last year’s news to generate buzz about whatever product you are trying to sell or promote, your page is obviously losing traction. We live in a day and age where businesses have basically reinvented themselves into the modern-day newspaper. In a world where clothing lines will generate publicity by supporting the victims of recent bombings, or fast food chains will tweet out in support of social causes, you have the ability to connect yourself to whatever is on the rise. The more pertinent your website can be to trending topics, the more lanes you end up opening in the highway of online traffic. There is one obstacle though; some people have really taken the “keyword” principle to heart and if a Batman movie came out, they would try the strategy of plastering Batman in as many spots as possible. The problem with that is that Googlebotand other web crawlers can tell the difference between a relevant website and the abuse of keywords. So remember to build around the keywords for your user, instead of around your user for the keywords.

Authority Potential

The end goal for every company should be to become the “Industry Authority”. In other words, if you are selling ball bearings, you want to become the CNN of ball bearings. You are the reliable source that people go to in order to find out all about ball bearings. Reaching this status requires frequent updates in addition to fresh content along with exceptional organization. Each new page gives search engines another page to index, and the industry authorities have up to tens of thousands of pages indexed by web crawlers. But having all the information isn’t the end all be all. Accessibility and organization across the whole user experience enhance your website to put it on top of the relevance list.