Install a blog. Seriously.
You don’t even have to update it daily. Google and other search engines honestly do not care that much. How do I know this?
I have a certain domain that I’ve held for… hmmm… about 6 years, give or take. If you go look at Archive.org, it’s gone through many iterations. Some are now rather embarrassing; for awhile the site was hosted for free on ‘Marhost’, though I don’t remember details. ‘Wigloo’ and Tripod have also been used before finally moving to a ’semi-paid’ host and then finally here.
Anyway, I finally moved it to the current host about 2 years ago. Since then, it didn’t get much traffic. Some, but not much. 10-20 visitors a MONTH average, 60 for a high point. So not much traffic at all. At least, not until I decided to scrap the way things were and install WordPress for my own ease of updating. I added a few posts and then forgot about it, having other important things come up.
That was 6 months ago. I remembered a few days ago to check the webstats and found that I’ve been getting 130-180 visitors a month since then. This may seem like very little, but remember… I did NOTHING with the site for six months. Zip. Zilch. No new content. NOTHING. And yet I’ve seen a 2-3x increase in visitors.
When my page was pure HTML, I’d get a handful of searches for various keywords; maybe 10 searches a month. Nothing important, mostly just rarer stuff that’s hard to find elsewhere. Now that I have WordPress installed, I have been getting a lot more hits for more general words. Apparently, I rank somewhat highly somewhere for the word ‘boldly’ (and other generic words). Even if it’s buried on the third or fourth page of the search, that’s pretty darn impressive because:
- I’ve done no search engine optimization. Beyond installing WordPress’s permalinks, I’ve done nothing to try to get search engines to visit.
- Even if I had done SEO, ‘boldly’ is not a keyword/phrase I would have chosen. Google reports about 9 million results for ‘boldly’. And I’m getting hits for it? How cool is that!
- I’ve done absolutely no advertising or posting of links for this site anywhere in the past 6 months.
- The blog had been sitting dormant for nearly six months. No updates, not even automatic ones. Yet I’m still getting way more traffic with it than I ever got with plain HTML pages.
To me, the evidence is irrefutable: search engines love blogs. Before, I was skeptical that it’d do much. But it’s hard to deny 18 months of stats as a plain, irregularly updated, HTML site + 6 months as a never-updated blog.
Now, while you may not see as dramatic an increase as 2-3x your current traffic, it still seems worth giving it a shot.