Is traffic useful without links?
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We have many articles on our sites that bring in a large volume of traffic but bring no links.
As an example we wrote an article about the hottest cities in the world. The article brings in over 1000 hits a month on Google and people spend an average of 4 minutes on the page and never return and never link to it.
The article also doesn't bring in business because the company sell Air Conditioning.
From an SEO point of view should we focus any time at all on writing articles that are useful for the internet community that bring in traffic but don't bring in many (any) links?
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I had a big laugh with your May 2011 entry. These are definately shareable/viral, especially in the hvac community (hvac-talk.com and other forums). You really do need to add share buttons all over the page.
Being a local air conditioner service business, I can sympathize with how dull our content can be. I too get traffic from all over but few links or shares. You should be miles ahead because of your humor (my posts tend to be pedantic). I wouldn't mind sending a link your way in a future blog post.
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Really appreciate your comments.
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I would make a temperature chart of the year for lots of big cities, showing on them the "air conditioning season". Post these on your website but more important give them to other air conditioning businesses to post on their website (with their branding and a linkback to you). These would be locked .pdf documents that you produce.
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Like the EGOL humour plus agree with EGOL 100% here. 100 hits and getting Facebook like is pretty good reward. I assume that you are linking within your site as well to keep people on the site.
And to answer your question you should always try and write articles that are useful to the Internet community but also to you. Socialize the pages as suggested but if you can write this quality on cities I am sure that you can also write it on Air Conditioners.
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My reactions to this are.....
You are successful.
Slap adsense on those pages to make a little money.
Examine the quality of those pages to determine if they are likable linkable tweetable. How could you change them to make them more sharable?
Maybe your best talents are not in air conditioning? Would your time be better spent writing a website about fun topics?
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Turn up the heat with the social buttons maybe have set at top and set at bottom, play around with it, have some text pointing to the share buttons 'share with your friends', you get the point.
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It's funny you mention that, I just noticed that it has brought in 20+ facebook likes / tweet, so maybe not so useless.
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Put some social tools around the content and try to get visitors to share the article, this will generate social signals which in turn effect SEO.
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