How to Increase Website Traffic…Apparently
Ages ago in the early 2000s, I got an itch to learn about web design, so I tried to teach myself how to create a website using html. I was able to whip up an amazingly terrible site called jonsource.com. I coded the thing in Notepad, paid some company to host it, and was wildly successful with maybe 100 hits! I posted a screenshot below; please keep in mind, this was the olden days before we found out Hulk Hogan was an insane racist, and either WordPress didn’t exist or I just didn’t know about it.
So, that was my first experience creating a website. Fast forward to 2011, and I finally hear about WordPress (cutting edge, right?). It sounded much easier than my first brush with web design, so I decided to dive in. And so, this site was born! Part of my interest stemmed from rabid excitement about the Dallas Mavericks winning the NBA championship; I wanted to shout about that from all corners of the globe. I also wanted a place to store some art, and possibly host a resume. I created a few other posts, many of which I deleted because they were just tests of things I wanted to try. After some experimenting, I basically abandoned the site for around six years.
Now here we are in 2017, and I’ve returned to use it as a place to throw all these pivot tables and charts I’ve made for fun over the years. Coming back to this site though, I was surprised to see a fairly high number of visitors. This nonsense art gallery somehow accumulated almost 9000 hits! That was very surprising, so I decided to see what WordPress could tell me about it.
Fortunately, WordPress’ statistics tracking is pretty robust, as you can see from the above images. Most of the referrers were from Bing or Google Image Search, and the top search terms all were related to…a bizarre little cat .gif image I had on an archived page. One of the pages I deleted from my initial 2011 experiment was about me trying to figure out how to make .gif files. I posted a couple of examples (below), and one of them apparently was the megaton hot search item for a few months in 2011.
So, that’s the secret. To increase your website’s hits, you just need to post images that people want to search for. Grab some memes and get those bad boys uploaded! Here’s some other .gifs, maybe they’ll help me now?
