Matt Cutts – Three Steps To A Great Site With Great Traffic

There’s a great discussion started by Michael Dorausch regarding Matt Cutts’ three steps process to build a site and get a ton of traffic. Michael transcribed and organized Matt Cutts’ evening presentation at PubCon this past week. Cutts made many great suggestions that any webmaster old or new ought to consider.

Step 1 – Make a Compelling Service

“If you’re trying to sell junk you’re going to have a much harder time. So spend the time, and the thing is you can start up a website really for a lot less money than you could even five or six years ago.

So, I think this has been a very useful theoretical discussion but let’s ground it a little bit, let’s take an actual specific example. Suppose you were going to start a site about, I don’t know, rumors about different companies, or something like that, OK?

And you only had 12 grand. First step is you make a compelling site, so imagine you’ve got that.”

Step 2 – Start a Blog

“Seriously, blogs are one of the easiest ways to get links, engage in conversation, if people badmouth you on the web you can… defend yourself or badmouth them right back, depending on what your personality is like.”

Step 3 – Smart Marketing

“Step number three is smart marketing and that can involve good SEO. If you do everything on WordPress you’re pretty much automatically covered as far as SEO, but you want to make sure things are crawlable. But the other aspect of marketing is having something interesting to say. So for example, valleywag, which is a Silicon Valley rumor sort of site, started out with a really juicy piece of gossip claiming that one person at a big company was dating another person at a big company. I’m not going to name them but they work at Google.

Um, and that helped propel that site up to a really big consciousness. So if I were doing, I don’t know, rumors about you know companies, or something like that, I would open it up to the public, but I would also try to do some investigating reporting, and get some really juicy tidbits or some really good scoops, because it’s not just controversy, it’s controversy backed by interesting facts.

And then I would think about broadening my scope a little bit. Start out with one or two companies that people are really interested in. Apple or Google or Yahoo or whoever. Dig down deep but also be open to new approaches. For example, what if you were to open up gossip and rumors about universities? Kids love to talk, right? People who are 20 years old will talk about all kinds of rumors about the university administration, other people on the university, classes, stuff like that. So looking for those kinds of niches in related areas can really help boost the buzz, boost the links, and boost the visibility to your website.”

More On WordPress

“All right so Stephan Spencer has talked about it but in general WordPress is pretty well SEO’d. Right? If you just start blogging you’ll pretty much be in good shape to get crawled by the search engines. In fact, WordPress 2.3 took some steps so that instead of having your content in three or four different places, they’re all unified on a single URL. So you can make your own HTML or you can pay some web designer to try to make a bunch of flash, but in some cases it makes sense to go for something that’s really cheap and really proven. And then if it works out you can always go with something custom down the road.”

Matt’s tips seem simple enough, but marketers, merchants, designers, SEOs, and major firms all seem to miss the point sometimes. Users desire compelling content– content that will get people excited about you and your product. Be unique and watch your visitor count skyrocket. In addition, develop a blog with information that will create links- use your head knowledge and information for the betterment of your site.