As I have my leg in plaster I am virtually tied to my computer. I decided that I might investigate the many programs available that are reportedly designed to increase the traffic to a website.

I looked carefully and found that most require a monthly subscription. Some as much as $40 a month!! I thought that was rather excessive for something that to my mind was slightly dubious and could result in issues with Google.

I found one ‘free’ program that was designed to increase traffic to a website by using targeted keywords. It takes the keywords and produces a webpage for each keyword.

You research keywords that are relevant to your website.  Once you have your keyword list you have to edit them to remove irrelevant ones and ones that do not make sense such as Publishing Self instead of Self Publishing.

It is then necessary to put the keywords into groups that have a similar context.  The next task is to produce a couple of paragraphs of text that each group of keywords fits into so that when each keyword of the group is inserted into the text it (almost) makes sense.

After editing the keywords that I had obtained for my test (I had searched Partnership Publishing) I was left with about 175 usable ones.  These I split into three context groups and wrote three versions of the text to fit around them. I was careful to keep it relevant to the keyword groups and the content of my website. The Traffic Hurricane sales pitch is that you can produce thousands of relevant pages easily. God knows what some of them must read like. With out careful keyword editing most pages would probably be rubbish.

One cornerstone of Traffic Hurricane is that it produces these ‘thousands’ of pages and they are all different keeping the search engines happy. It did not really work that way. I had three different context folders for the keywords. In reality this produced 98 pages using one version of the text (page content) 53 pages of the second version and 24 pages for the final group

The instructions recommend that you use a different domain name for the Traffic Hurricane pages. When the software produces each page it links it to your main website using a normal URL link in a prominent position. The reason for the separate domain name is ‘just in case’ the search engines smell a rat and delist the domain the Hurricane pages sit on.

The software was uploaded to my new domain folder and I followed through the process of producing the Hurricane pages. I have to admit it was easy to do. The default template pages Hurricane comes with were OK but not anything to write home about.

So after a little experimentation I had 175 Traffic Hurricane pages sitting in three separate folders. I was concerned that other than the keywords each page was not much different from another.

The next concern I had was that they looked to me a little like Doorway Pages. Something Google frowns upon.

The big killer for me was that as I had the Light version there were adverts controlled by the agent who supplied the software. They were large and obtrusive, they did not fit the page correctly and most were advertising Asian Women!!! Yep I REALLY want my website associated with that!!

On the bottom of the page was a large banner advert for the designer and main supplier of Traffic Hurricane. So are you going to tell me that having over a hundred pages with links back to the Traffic Hurricane designer is not going to get noticed by the Google web crawlers?

If you want a version that does not display the suppliers adverts then you pay $192 for the Pro version and you can add your own advertisements. I bet you a pound to a pinch of shit that there is still a banner advert for Traffic Hurricane on the ‘Pro’ version!

So would I pay $192 for something that produces hundreds of pages containing almost the same content and looks suspiciously like Doorway Pages? No I certainly would not! Have I kept the Light version running? No, once I saw the garish and unsavoury advertisements I had no control of as well as the sameness of the content I deleted it all and parked my new domain name.

Having such things coupled to my website was a risk that I did not want to take. So in conclusion the only way to increase traffic is by having genuine content and something people want to read.

Guardian Two Word count 23400 (Oh dear must get on with it!!!)