93South - Thoughts on New England Web 2.0

This is just a small tip for the SEO / online marketing crowd out there. I was catching up on some of the sites that came across my RSS reader recently and I wanted to pass along one of interesting ones - the traffic stats for any page on Wikipedia. It’s a good resource if you have ever wanted to know how much traffic you might get from placing your site on a search result first page.

Why? The chances are pretty good that a Wikipedia page has already placed on the first page for one of your coveted search terms. The boston Wikipedia page (5th or 6th result on Google), for example, was viewed 83,718 times in February and the web_2.0 page (#1 on Google) was viewed 73,308.

It’s not perfect (assuming the Wikipedia pages capture the majority of it’s traffic from the search engines for a start) but it can help give you an idea on how other pages that are already on the first page are doing.

By the way, “Boston Web 2.0” is not a page I could find on Wikipedia but I do know what traffic that is going to get you (answer: It’s not exactly the most searched for phrase on the web).

Of course, you could just use the tool to see how many times the Britney Spears page is loaded or what the other top read articles on Wikipedia were on the site last month.

Enjoy!