How to drive traffic to a web site

The Forerunner web site has been around since 1996 and is a record of almost every article I have ever written or published. It contains articles I wrote from 1987 until the present. It also has a massive pro-life site designed by Meredith Raney that is more vast than anything I have yet seen. It is the public record describing how, by the grace of God, a handful of Christian activists closed all the abortion clinics in Brevard County:

https://www.forerunner.com/fyi

While a lot of things have changed with me in the past few years, I haven’t changed my theology and worldview so drastically that I will ever completely disavow what I wrote all those years ago. At worst even the most irrelevant articles are an accurate historical record of my work.

However, when I redesigned the web site four months ago, I was considering jettisoning a few of the articles that were no longer relevant to anything I am concerned about at present. Then a friend pointed out that some of those articles, even if they have relatively low traffic, may be stumbled onto by people doing searches. Since I have over 2000 articles at forerunner.com people are not entering mainly from the front index page. People find one of those 2000 pages and they navigate elsewhere on the site.

All external links to those 2000 pages drives the traffic to the site. Ranking.com has recorded over 11,000 links to forerunner.com. Because I have so many links into the site some individual pages are very popular.

For instance, go to Google.com and type in PHILLIS WHEATLEY. You will see forerunner.com is #3.

https://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0214_Phillis_Wheatley

The key word THEONOMY yields a #1 ranking for forerunner.com on Google.

https://www.forerunner.com/theofaq.html

And there are many other search words that yield similar indexing/ranking.

There are many other key words and phrases that give forerunner.com a page rank in the top ten on the major search engines.

Why are these ranked so high?

The pages were the first on their topic ten years ago when the web was still in its infancy.
In that time, these individual pages have generated many outside links from other sites.
Search engines look at the number of links as the number one factor for indexing / ranking.
A high ranking in the search engines leads to more visits and higher ranking in the index.
All these factors work together to drive traffic, it’s like a snowball effect.

And because of that situation, I can add a single page and it will quickly be indexed and ranked highly because of the preeminence of the entire site.

For instance, two months ago, I bought a non-copyrighted an article called:

“Analyzing Website Traffic”

https://www.forerunner.com/e-business/X0021_Analyzing_Website_Tr

Do a search for “Analyzing Website Traffic” and you will see The Forerunner’s article is already #9 in ranking on the Google index. The amazing thing about this is that this is a non-copyrighted article that is sold to help web sites generate traffic. It appears on 416 other sites indexed by Google.

The reason for the fast track on the major search engines is that forerunner.com has had ten years to build its traffic. Other web sites and search engine robots have done all the work without me even knowing how was done!

(Does that sound like the premise of a science fiction novel?)

That is why the domain name of forerunner.com is more valuable to me than it would be to anyone else who did not have 2000 articles on their web site for ten years. There will probably never be a need for me to start another web site under a new domain name. This domain name will always give me the better traffic than a new site would.

In fact, my top priority for the summer of 2006 is to add 1000 pages to the site. That in itself ought to double my traffic and e-commerce income simply because I know which are the most popular types of articles on my site.

I am often surprised that a long ago forgotten article will suddenly make it onto a national news service’s list of links and suddenly that article will jump to the top of my referral list. We just had our national day of prayer, so people were searching for information on that and they found a 1988 article about the first national day of prayer that President Reagan instituted as a yearly event. Until last week, it was a forgotten article, but in the last seven days it has vaulted to the number 1 page on my site.

https://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0324_National_Day_of_Pray

Now the key phrase “National Day of Prayer” is currently #7 on Google.

You might be surprised to see the list of the most popular referrer pages in the first week of May 2006:

https://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0324_National_Day_of_Pray

https://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0497_DeMar_-_Behaviorism

https://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0214_Phillis_Wheatley

https://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0038_Bette_Davis

https://www.forerunner.com/chalcedon/X0020_15._Council_of_Trent

https://www.forerunner.com/champion/X0004_3._Oliver_Cromwell

https://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0098_Ban_on_school_prayer

https://www.forerunner.com/videos.html

https://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0388_Effects_of_Pornograp

https://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0526_Bios-_John_Winthrop

https://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0525_Bios-_John_Knox