Listings of sites for sale give great insight to SEO and web traffic

 A couple of days of hugely interesting reading at flippa.com a site that brokers sites for sale revealed a plethora of insights and useful tools.

It is a real eye opener to see just how much traffic a site can make and how.

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The figures aren't always trustworthy, the sellers are for the most part honest about what they claim publicly, but equally, will refrain from disclosing their full secrets; but with a good pair of streetwise glasses on you can sometimes make out what's really what or not.

Some have hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month with very little substantive content, others have over a million with just a selection of free games on them. Some are fantastic and beautiful sites that people have put years and years of work into that are all too often sold at a fraction of the price of those high traffic sites.

These masters of the trade that understand that even the placement and frequency of words within a paragraph matter, which inward links to have and which not in order to get considerable income streams from what are often supremely poorly paid advertising sources, have a knowledge that is enormously useful and that to an extent actually shapes the web.

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The really high traffic sites that were listed had 20 or 30 free flash games on their front page each of which had a small advertisement embedded in it prior to playing. The games themselves were offered out to other sites for other webmasters to gain traffic and interest. So the traffic (and earnings) were real and very targeted. i.e. you'd have a hard time selling anything else on these sites. There's a lesson.

Some of the other high traffic sites had only a couple of months of history, a good number of backlinks, huge traffic and some fairly unconvincing content. It seems that some of these may have been hastily put up sites on domains that had been caught after someone else left them to expire that already had significant traffic. Others seemed to have advantages available only to the seller, for instance they may have had good friends or some sort of network of content managers who could put links on large highly regarded sites for them. This high PR love would emanate from the highly regarded site to theirs and they'd consequently get higher search engine rankings. So the lesson learned here is that good high quality backlinks are superb for a site, and obviously the more relevant the better. Whilst we all knew that, we're now interested in how to get them! . . . no clues here, sorry!

What is also vaguely apparent, at least on these high traffic sites, is that the quality of design doesn't seem to count for much. Or maybe there is a sort of minimum standard of design that is acceptable for a visitor but more effectively directly delivers the content.

This is, to a designer, a great shame and a situation worthy of protest and rebellion. It would be great to prove that high traffic and good design makes for a great site. Well, maybe it does and these sites just aren't for sale or at least listed on flippa.

And of course these observations are generalisations with limited scope; it all depends on what you're selling and at the end of the day the "quality" of the traffic coming to a site - i.e. the relevance to the final offer that you are hoping to make - is where it counts.