I have a simple little site called Gumbo City that is of course about gumbo recipes and was the first website that I created. I created it because a friend of mine had a simple recipe site that was making about $20 a day with only about 12 pages on it. (That site is now ranked #1 on SERP for a very good keyword and is making about $40 a day) Any way I digress, point is this. While I did follow the Google Webmaster guides for sites and a few other SEO techniques it has never been a exciting site and I don’t do much with it at this point. It has slowly and naturally been building in traffic. It has gone been going up about 10-15 hits a week for some time now. I did add a blog to it because it was just a strait html site to start with. The blog just lets me add fresh content easer. After that it did jump in ranking some. It has been on and off the first page of the SERP for 6 months. In the last 3 months it has been sitting at number #4 for the keyword “gumbo recipe”. And as expected traffic took a jump and moved up over the 100 hits a day. Now this is not a great feat realize that I do nothing to this site other than maybe add a new recipe once a week. I’m not out looking for links or marketing this site it is all natural. I got a boost in traffic by moving to the #4 position that was noticeable. About 3 weeks ago the site moved up to the #3 spot and again I got a noticeable jump in traffic. Could I get this site to #1? Yea I could with effort but the ROI is not worth it. The site is better information to me by watching it grow on its own which is the point to this post.

The last 2 days the traffic to the site doubled and I had no clue as to why till I talked to my wife last night. I made a comment that the site had doubled in traffic and that I wasn’t sure why. She got this look on her like a cat that was hiding a mouse and promptly told me that she knew something that I didn’t. I hate that. Any way she proceeded to tell me that Rachel Ray had show on of all things “Gumbo”.  I went back and looked at my stats and sure enough starting at about that time the traffic started to roll in. This is one of the Best examples that I have seen of offsite events effecting traffic.

So make a list of known events and make sure that you have content and keywords that reflect these so when these type of things happen that you are set to take advantage of them.