Opinions on best use of time

[vero]

Given a limited amount of time, what is everyone's opinion on the most important thing to do, in order to increase traffic to a website:

1 - write quality articles with new url's to add to the site
2 - add quality information to existing articles (ie bulk existing articles out even more, keeping their same url)
3 - write quality articles for directories, as a way to get more people using them and thus linking to your site?

Just wondering what people think should be focused on first...

[goodroi]

It depends on your personal situation.

If you have a new site with very few pages then go with option 1 and build out more pages.

If you have an old site that was impacted by Panda, you will probably want option 2 and focus on adding relevant content to your lower quality pages.

As for option three, IMHO article directories are a very low ROI. I would much rather contact relevant websites and directly offer my content services. For example reach out to relevant bloggers and offer to guest blog for them. Email journalists who have written on your industry and/or competitor and offer to help them research their next article or give them an interview. If you are a manufacturer offer your distributors original free content. The better quality your content is the more likely other webmasters will agree to add it to their site and more importantly let it stay up for a long time sending you link juice.

[aristotle]

Maybe you should just do whatever you think will add the most value to the site. Bigger isn't always better. Sometimes a shorter article can have more impact and be more effective than a longer article. Also, when you add more pages, you usually dilute the pagerank juice going to the existing pages because some of it gets spread to the new pages. In sum, just do whatever you think will create the best site overall.

[tangor]

Option 1 is the way to both growth and traffic (recurring visitors) as long as quality does not suffer, nor is there undue duplication of existing site content.

Option 2 is useful for those pages which are really thin and a rewrite will result in a higher quality product, but in general I wouldn't spend too much time with these pages.

[Staffa]

Option 4

Protect your site from being scraped, have your quality content plastered all over the web and then have to compete with the scrapers in the listings

[kidder]

I agree with aristotle, you should invest some time in finding and developing a point of difference. Think about your users and how you can serve them the best, there are many angles...