Generating traffic to your website is one of the first steps to success with Internet marketing. After all, the more website traffic you have, the more products you can sell (or services, subscriptions, advertising, etc.). No matter what your business model might be, you can always benefit from additional website traffic.

Search engine optimization is one of the many ways you can generate this much-needed traffic. But many webmasters make the mistake of only focusing on their top 3 to 5 key phrases when generating website content. This can greatly reduce the amount of traffic you receive, and here's why.

Most business websites are related to a certain subject. That subject usually relates to the products or services being sold. But there are often many additional (and highly popular) subject areas that can bring qualified traffic to the website. These "adjacent" topics -- and the phrases that describe them -- might not be exact matches for the website's main subject, but they can still bring plenty of valuable web traffic.    

This will be much clearer with a real-world example:

Expanding Content to Address Popular Topics
I have a website that pertains to home buying. Specifically, it caters to first-time home buyers, offering advice on everything from house hunting to mortgage loans. I get a steady amount of traffic to this website, but I could always benefit from additional traffic. Who couldn't, right?

One area of this website explains the basic types of mortgage loans, and over the years it has achieved good search engine ranking for various mortgage-related phrases. While watching the news lately, I've noticed a lot of stories about home foreclosures. Specifically, these news stories talk about home buyers who have to choose "subprime" mortgage loans because of past credit problems. Later down the road, when those adjustable-rate mortgages reset to higher interest rates, the homeowners are overwhelmed. As a result, they become another statistic in the current spike of home foreclosures.

Let me tell you, nothing drives Internet search patterns like the media. There's a reason Paris Hilton is one of the most "Googled" people on the planet -- she gets a lot of media coverage! So realizing that subprime mortgages were getting a lot of coverage, I did some research and fou
nd that, sure enough, there's a lot of Internet search for those types of phrases.

Now, my home buying website already ranked well for a variety of mortgage phrases. But I didn't have a single article on there about subprime mortgages. However, as you may know, ranking well for a certain group of topics / phrases makes it easy to branch out into related areas. So here I had (A) a website that ranked well for mortgage phrases, (B) a lot of Internet search for subprime mortgage phrases, but (C) nothing connecting the dots.

So what did I do? I started writing, that's what! I created a tutorial on subprime mortgages and their connection to home foreclosures -- sort of a "buyer be warned" kind of thing. I dug deep to make it a worthwhile read, helpful in many regards.

And, of course, I made sure it was highly optimized for various "subprime mortgage" phrases, the ones identified during my key phrase research.

Then I did some basic link-building work to make sure the page was found by search engines. Long story short, the page began climbing the search engines for "subprime mortgage" phrases, and I began to capitalize on all that media-driven search traffic. After only a month's time, I was enjoying another 50 - 75 visitors per day, all from subprime-related search queries.

Flipping houses is another area where I've done the same thing. Thanks to TLC and HGTV, everybody wants to get rich quick by buying, renovating and reselling (flipping) investment properties. So I added resources to the home buying website to capitalize on the large number of "house flipping" searches.

That is what I mean by addressing popular topics on your website.

Applying This to Your Website
You can take the process I've outlined above and apply it to your own website, just as easily as I did (and possibly with even better results). All you have to do is identify popular topics that are somehow related to your website -- or your products / services -- and then build some content around those topics. After that, it's just a matter optimizing those pages like you would any other.

Keep an eye and ear to the media, and you'll be able to spot certain topics on the rise (just like I did with subprime mortgages and house flipping). What is being talked about on the local news, or written about in the newspaper? What topics are being blogged about and appearing all over the Web? Single out the topics that are related to your audience and website, and use them to drive additional web traffic.