One of my favorite soap boxes to hop up on has to do with the importance of adding original content to your Point2 site. It seems like at least once a day, I'm on the phone with or emailing someone to recommend adding lots of original content to his or her site. I often direct people to Barbara Reeves and Joe Janus' sites as great models for site content.

Both Joe's and Barbara's sites contain an unusual amount of original content. Barbara has written most of hers herself, while Joe has a copywriter friend help with his site.

Great content helps engage site visitors so that they'll keep using your site and eventually contact you about buying or selling. It's especially helpful to people who are relocating to an unfamiliar area.

A second very important reason to add original content is that it helps attract the search engines. The more content you add, the more you are likely to attract the type of searches often referred to as "long tail" searches. These are searches on unexpected keyphrases, those keyphrases for which your site may not be optimized.

Joe's site was originally on Advanced Access. Last fall, I helped him move it to Point2. Since then, he has been religiously adding new pages, both about architectural styles common in the Phoenix area and about popular upscale Phoenix neighborhoods. Since November 2007, his number of unique daily visitors has almost doubled, reaching a respectable 105 average daily unique visitors.

Last May, people reached Joe's site by searching on over 1800 different keyphrases. Many of them were the type of keyphrase you might expect, such as "Phoenix homes for sale." But an amazing number of them were for totally unexpected words and phrases, some valuable, such as the names of prominent Phoenix builders and architects and of upscale neighborhoods such as Arcadia and CamelBack Canyon, and some of questionable or no value, such as "Spanish style TV trays."

But the nice thing about traffic, even if it doesn't bring buyers to a site, is that traffic breeds traffic. In other words, it makes a site appear more authoritative to the search engines and more likely to rank well.

Joe has graciously agreed to allow me to give you a "backstage view" of some of his Ultrastat search stats from last May. The image shown is a composite of Ultrastat search keyphrase info for around 1/4 of the keyphrases used to reach his site. Check out some of the ways people found his site; could you have predicted and optimized for some of these keyphrases?

Since Joe's site is focused on architecturally unique homes, much of his content might be inappropriate for your own site. But check out the number of people who come to his site via searches on neighborhoods like Camelback Canyon, Biltmore and Arcadia. Does this give you some ideas for improving traffic to your site by adding original content about your own market area?