Search engine optimization and engagement are critical Web strategies deserving perpetual oversight and review. With fewer and fewer printed pieces for either booth sales or attendance promotion, your Web site must carry those responsibilities. If you’re not driving people to your site — or keeping them there — you’re making both of those jobs that much harder.We asked Web content development experts for their favorite methods for driving — and keeping — Web traffic.

OPTIMIZATION AND TRAFFIC

Topic Pages Are the Anchors

We’re all creating hundreds of thousands of pages of content that come and go on a daily basis. Topic pages that never change their URLs, however, are like a traffic magnet. Over time, other sites will link to them, building up that all-important “Google juice,” and topic pages tend to be very keyword heavy.

“If something has been up over time, you build up more incoming links,” says Kelly Maloni, Director of Product Development at New York Magazine. “Google is looking for incoming links, keyword-friendly URLs and keyword-rich pages. Pages that have those, and don’t change over and over again, have a lot of weight. It’s about owning the keywords, a simple URL and owning that space.”

Remember Your 301 Redirects

Every site needs to rebuild its structure at some time or another. If you do have to change a URL to a topic page or a directory page, make sure you alert the search engines with a 301 Redirect command, which tells search engines that the old URL is the same as the new one.

“We’re pretty obsessive about the 301 Redirects,” says Maloni, who warns that without it, Google will treat the URL as a brand new one and all the elements built up over time that gave the page a high ranking will be erased. SEO for that section will have to start all over again. “Instead, a 301 Redirect tells Google that the old URL is now the new one, and to consider them the same page and keep the page rank.”

Social Media Isn’t Just a Buzz Phrase

If it doesn’t already, social media will soon account for a good portion of your traffic. Flickr, Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter — use them all, but not indiscriminately. If you select the channels carefully and position the content in a way that makes sense to your brand, it can be a powerful traffic driver.

Leverage Your Analytics

“A lot of my work comes from looking at analytics,” says Alison McPartland,Manager of Search and Discovery Strategies at Questex Media.McPartland created a “Top Author” report that identifies what content brings in the most traffic. “We pull what the topic is and analyze page views, percentage over site, total amount of keywords that were driven to that piece, average time spent, bounce rate and exit rate.”

The content analytics reveal how visitors find the content (keywords) and what topics are trending high.

Leveraging Syndication’s Results

Finding other Web sites and portals to syndicate your content is another way of driving traffic back to your site, but it’s what you do with the traffic that’s also important.

The E-Newsletter Connection

Create and send e-newsletters as often as people give you permission to. It’s your way of reminding people what’s on your site. Depending on your site, and the content of your newsletters, you can double or quadruple your traffic when the e-mails go out.

CONTENT AND ENGAGEMENT

Tease Related Content

“You want to watch for people viewing multiple pages of content across the board,” says Omid Jahanbin, Director of Product Design and Creative Strategies, Interactive Platforms, at Cygnus Business Media. “We want to keep on average four pages of content on the top of our page view line.”

Time the Release of Certain Content

Post content when your audience is most likely to read it. “You want to release content when you have a high-traffic period,” Jahanbin says. “Typically, 11:00 a.m. is very high.”

The added benefit here, Jahanbin says, is that readers are more likely to avail themselves of the sharing functions, too — e-mail to a friend and the social networking buttons. “There’s a reason corporations release news they don’t like on a Friday. It’s lost its mystique by Monday.”

Content Packaging and Presentation

Don’t just load Word docs. Use infographics, slide shows and video. Turn 25 tips into a one-minute Webexclusive video clip.

Reformat Your Video Presentation

Consider breaking up a longer-form video subject into a number of shorter clips that can play in a series. Jason Revzon, Vice President of Taunton Interactive, Taunton Press, has introduced “snack-sized” videos that visitors are watching all at once. “We recently went from a single-clip player on a page to a player that has eight clips on a subject that play in order,” he says. “People are watching eight videos on average, and that keeps them there a long time. They’re small nuggets — between 40 seconds and two minutes — but they’re put together in a way that lets you lean back and enjoy them.”

Make Your Slideshows Tell a Story

A perennial page-view favorite, it can actually be hard for image-only slideshows to keep readers until the end. At UBM’s Channelweb.com,Vice President Larry Hooper says they get 80 percent pull-through on their slideshows by adding some content. “We treat them like stories, not like a bunch of pictures with captions,” he says. “We take a graphic novel approach to pull people through.”

Pull Your Visitors into Guiding Development

User-generated content is one thing, but having your site’s most loyal visitors help guide Web development accomplishes two things: You get first-hand knowledge of what matters most to your attendees and exhibitors, and your users are pulled deeper into the site experience.