In 2002, the various web sites I run served up 4,466,455 pages — an average of 12,263 per day. That was a 45 percent increase over 2001. A major source of the increase as AnimalRights.Net, which logged 1,354,285 page views in 2002. Below is a plot of traffic trends for my sites since 1997. Clearly I’m still headed in the right direction:
One of the things that has really helped fuel web site traffic, in my opinion, has been the ability to create topical pages that take the hundreds of articles I’ve written on a given topic like animal rights and break them down into hundreds of topical web pages. On this site, for example, you can get an dynamically generated list of articles I’ve written about 9/11 or space travel.
In 2002, I was creating such pages right and let. Back in October 2001, Seth wrote that my sites could benefit from “more categories.” How does 1,136 categories across 6 sites (189 average/site) strike you? By the end of 2003, I will likely be closer to 2,000 categories.
These help drive traffic, by the way, because they tend to end up near the top on Google searches. With animal rights, for example, I have top-10 results on dozens of keywords. Ingrid Newkirk can’t be happy that two of the three top results searching on her name point to my site which is extremely critical of her.
The other thing that took off in 2002 was posts to the discussion forum areas of the sites I run. For the year, 15,727 messages were posted to my site. The bulk of those were at AnimalRights.Net, where toward the end of the year the level of discussion started to overwhelm even me. With visitors posting 150-170 messages a day, the discussion was fast and furious.