How to Increase Website Traffic

I generally haven't put a lot of time into maintaining this blog, and mostly forgot about it for a couple years.   :-)

I've never really blogged frequently, and I took a break from posting any articles around 2011 and started posting again in 2014 (was busy).  Although I noticed the vacation created an interesting sociological experiment with the overall web traffic:

Traffic is fairly steady (and gradually falls) when the site is not updated at all -- from September 2011 to August 2014.

So, basically if you want more web traffic, increase both the number of articles on your website, and the number of "new" articles.    Overall, the increase in traffic is largely correlated with adding new articles.

Also, the posts that have gotten the most traffic are about things where I spent more than an hour "Googling" for something, and couldn't find a good answer or solution.  If you can't find it, there's a vacuum in the available information and you'll end up higher in Google's search result.   Even though the topic might be only interesting to a smaller demographic, anything on these topics will get a lot of  hits from Google searches.

I also notice "fuzzy" topics may do better that pure information, as readers will discuss the topic further with others.  My most popular articles are opinion articles regarding Linux.

This information is probably commonsensical, though what I thought what was interesting, was to actually see a confirmation of SEO principles with real web statistics.  After all, who else is going to let their website languish for years, for the benefit of science?  ;-)