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I have seen our traffic grow by about 800% in the last year, we are now (still nowhere) at about 1.300 hits for pages a month, or about 30-40 a day (with peaks to about 80-100 a day).
Since the site contains only product information, no pricing, and atm. no selling of products (only a feedback/request offer form) it is quite small (2.5MB total data).
My question is now: how can I make people come back, or recommend the site on (no, I dont want a 'affilate program'). What are the factors that distinguish a 'normal' site from a flourishing one?
And yes, the site is listed in the major search engines ,as well as ODP and Yahoo.
Make yourself the foremost authority on the Net for your products. Answer all possible product related questions on the site. Continually add info, don't hold back anything that might be of value to the user. More info is always better than less and the more you have on the site, the less likely you will get calls resulting in less time costly customer support.
a. I think the content may have changed and I'd like to see what's new.
b. I was looking for a particular product or service.
If you're just showing product info and don't update content about the third time a visitor goes to that page will be their last they already know nothing changes. You may want to check the log files and see how the visitors get to the site, if the major keywords have something to do with a product like "steel widget" then make sure that is the first thing they find, if the it is content related like "all about widgets" then you may want to have a product image as well as a useful content on the product.
Without proper optimization and a really good marketing campaign people searching for vacuum cleaners will eventually tire of reading about them and looking at them, if your product or service fills a niche market that borders on dull you can't expect too many repeat visitors, but new content always helps.
