How do websites become popular?

How can you promote your website (or blog) to get a ton of traffic? This is the million-dollar question: I certainly don't have all the answers, but I'm throwing my 2 cents worth in here in the context of my new site squidsquid.com.

Web directories

First off I decided to get my new site listed in some internet directories. Getting links from high ranking sites is good for two reasons - firstly you get the traffic directed from these sites, and secondly the links contribute to increasing your Google pagerank (Google pagerank is a measure of how 'important' your page is, and affects how highly your page will rank in results of a relevant Google search). So getting listed in popular web directories should be good. I targeted mainly humor directories and got my site listed on a few. The most successful of these has been Rawmeat.com, from which I've received about 100 visitors. I've submitted to i-am-bored.com several times (a very popular site - Alexa traffic rank), without success.

Search engines

Many sites get the majority of their traffic from search engines, and the majority of these searches are from Google (some estimates around 80%). Some search engines require you to submit your site to them, whereas others crawl the web to automatically detect content (Google is in this category). I took the time to submit my site to a few search engine directories, although I really have no idea what effect, if any, this has had. Its probably worth submitting to dmoz at least, but note that it may take several weeks or more to be included, followed by an additional wait to be included by partner sites that use the data (AOL Search, Google, Netscape Search, Yahoo Search).

For my particular type of site however, I'm not sure that search engines will necessarily be the biggest source of traffic. For example, people that are searching for information about giant squid are not likely to find a lot of useful material on squidsquid.com. However, comedy sites such as catsthatlooklikehitler.com (exactly what it sounds like!), Chuck Norris facts (e.g. "There is no chin behind Chuck Norris’ beard. There is only another fist.") and rathergood.com (a bunch of silly flash videos etc) have relatively high Google pagerank and Alexa stats, yet it seems unlikely that most new visitors would be from search engine referrals (e.g. searching for 'hitler cat')! It seems more likely that these sites become popular through 'word of web' - blogs, emails, forums, social bookmarking etc. The whole complicated area of search engine optimisation (SEO) is of course also relevant here, but that's another kettle of fish (or pandora's box?). Anyway, I've been arguing that certain types of site such as my own are not likely to get a lot of search engine referral traffic (apart from searches by users already looking for a specific site e.g. "squidsquid").

As an aside, if the Google sandbox really exists, then I think I'm in it at present. The 'sandbox effect' is a theory that explains the observed phenomena that newly registered domains tend to receive lower pageranks for all but very specific searches (e.g. for the company name). Some people believe that this is due to an intentional Google filter, designed to slow down spam websites that abuse search engine optimisation techniques. Others believe it is simply a result of the way that Google indexes and ranks pages (and the time that this takes). In any case, the result is that a new domain will likely not rank very highly for relevant searches on Google for some period of time (from a few months up to a year), and there seems to be very little that can be done to avoid it. Because Google is the biggest source of search engine referrals, and my pages are currently low on most relevant results (perhaps because of the sandbox), it is difficult to estimate how much search engine traffic I might get in the future.

Web 2.0 and site promotion

'Web 2.0' is a popular buzzword at present - I use the term here to mean something like 'internet sites and services that let people collaborate and share information in new ways, with a focus on user production and control of content'. Well known examples are Wikipedia and Youtube. In terms of promoting your web content, the most relevant are news sites such as Digg and Reddit, and social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Technorati. Some of these sites are pretty cool, and you can find a lot of interesting stuff on them. The basic principle is that articles/links that are good (or interesting/ controversial/ 'sticky') will tend to be promoted as people 'vote' for them (by digging, bookmarking, tagging or whatever).

The table and graph below are the result of a quick bit of traffic research on Alexa, using 3 month averages. The list is just a sample of such sites, and is by no means exhaustive. Note that some of the less popular sites, such as Techtagg and Bluedot are pretty new, so their traffic rankings will likely increase. Interestingly, Fark only allows 5% of submitted stories to the front page i.e. it is strongly edited (although all of them are shown on totalfark - the paid version of the site). In this sense it is more similar to a traditional web directory type site as control of content is partially centralised, and in part controlled by users.

Site	Traffic rank	Reach per million users	Comments
digg.com	91	7,980
netscape.com	383	2,555	Traffic steadily declining for about 2 years
slashdot.org	223	4,610	Tech oriented
fark.com	889	1,175	Humor oriented
reddit.com	1,037	912.5
shoutwire.com	5,724	229
techtagg.com	70,771	16.5	Tech oriented
technorati.com	229	3,630	Social bookmarking, blogs
blinklist.com	3,481	360	Social bookmarking
bluedot.us	17,937	65	Social bookmarking

Of these sites, Digg is the most popular. It's easy to submit a story to Digg, and you will definitely get some traffic straight away from submission. Getting a lot of traffic, and ideally getting promoted to the front page is however another matter. Of note in the interesting article on the beginning stages of a high-traffic website is that the authors say that despite trying almost daily it took them months to get a story promoted to the front page of one of the sites listed above. There has been some debate about people 'gaming' the system, and claims that a small number of users effectively control a large portion of the promoted articles. Also read the amusing to 10 steps to guarantee you make the Digg front page which is simultaneously a sarcastic dig at Digg users and a largely accurate portrayal. Certainly if you have friends on the network, who are likely to read (and digg) your articles when you submit them, you are much more likely to get stories promoted. In general, if you want to get a lot of traffic from these web 2.0 sites, you probably need to do some research and tailor your content somewhat to match the sort of stories that tend to get promoted.

Other promotion options

• Viral advertising - as defined at wikipedia: "The term 'viral advertising' refers to the idea that people will pass on and share interesting and entertaining content; this is often sponsored by a brand, which is looking to build awareness of a product or service. These viral commercials often take the form of funny video clips, or interactive Flash games, an advergame, images, and even text." Not something I've tried - yet - but it should be fairly easy to try out...
• Paid advertising - depends on your budget, and the type of site you have. If you are selling a product, it might be an option, but if you are using a form of affiliate marketing to generate revenue (e.g. Google adsense), then this probably doesn't make sense.
• Link exchanges - link exchanges are another way to increase both traffic and your pagerank (getting those all important inbound links). But it seems like this is difficult if you don't already have decent traffic to your site (i.e. who would want to exchange links with a low traffic site?).

Content is king?

There is an argument that if you create good or interesting enough content, then the visitors and traffic will follow. While I think this is true to an extent (and I agree with a focus on content over excessive promotion/optimisation etc), you also need some ways of getting your content out there in the first place. My two biggest sources of traffic so far (from the 9 at Yahoo, and BBC Radio1) were not from a direct result of my own promotion efforts i.e. I did not 'submit' these links, they were picked up in some other unknown way. I've also received a lot of traffic from links on blogs, forums and emails etc. Presumably this is because people found the content original/funny/sticky enough to want to share with other people. Don't spend too much time monitoring your traffic, search engine optimising, or submitting to directories, Digg etc, at the expense of creating good content on your site - whatever that might be!