When Will the Traffic Come?

WHEN DOES THE TRAFFIC COME?

Build it, and they will come. In the World Wide Web, you can't take that for granted.

However, if you truly build a better mousetrap (or, in our case, a better Web page), then yes, the World Wide Web will beat a path to your door.

Say you really have built a Hub that's far better, more informative and more readable than the other pages that Google (and Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and others) serves up on a relevant query. Why isn't Google sending visitors to your Hub instead?

It's a matter of trust and positive feedback.

Google is an incredulous search engine--it typically takes them around 9 months to start sending visitors to a new site that it isn't sure is good quality. And you'll have to agree that there is a lot of garbage out there for Google to sift through.

Fortunately, HubPages is a trusted site, and gets crawled (checked for new pages) daily by Google. Google will likely "see" and put your Hub in its index within days. It trusts HubPages.com enough to do that. However, it doesn't know if its searchers will really like what you've written relative to other pages out there.

What will convince Google to send you more visitors is positive feedback--both from other Web sites, and from visitors it actually does send to your Hub.

Having links to your Hubs from other sites (from your blog, your MySpace profile, from Digg, etc.) all count as "thumbs-up" feedback on the quality of your Hubs. The reasoning is that if someone puts a link to your Hub on their site, it means that it is so good that they want to share it with their site's readers. One of the most important things you can do to make Google really take your Hubs seriously is to get those backlinks. (Read more here and here)

Once Google starts sending visitors to your page, it does so cautiously. And then it watches what people do. Do visitors:

• Click a link to your Hub on a search results page? (meaning your title answers what they're looking for)
• Do they stay on your Hub, or do they go back to Google and try another link because your Hub didn't answer their question?

The second form of feedback--if visitors are happy enough with your Hub to stay there--tells Google how high-quality and engaging your Hub is. If a visitor bounces back to Google in about 5 seconds, chances are they really didn't like the page at all.

So if the feedback-from backlinks, likelihood of clicks from the search results page, and if visitors stay on the page and don't go back to Google-are all assessed by Google, and if they all point to a great page, they'll start sending you more serious traffic (anywhere from 5-100+ visits a day) within a week or two. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later.

And the more you publish and group similar Hubs together, the more the traffic increases in whole and to each Hub. There is tremendous value in persistence and covering all the long-tail/niche aspects to the topics that interest you, not just the general, basic stuff.