Here is an expert strategy straight out of the natural world for rapidly increasing traffic to your blog or website. We know that a great deal of traffic these days comes from search engines, based on keywords. This traffic is free, relevant, and never dies. It is also well known that blog posts with quality content are the key to attracting free traffic from web searches. It is less well known that posting on events well ahead of time is a very effective strategy for generating new traffic.

Many organisms live by exploiting ephemeral niches. Because most food resources appear seasonally, where they can predict ahead, organisms prepare themselves to exploit it. A herd of caribou starts to migrate to pastures before spring arrives. Ants build nests before the summer rains.

The same pre-emptive strategy is very effective on the web. Of course, retailers have always used the strategy of stocking up on in-demand article ahead of time. Who is interested in buying Christmas decorations the day after Christmas? Similarly, a post after the event is less effective than a post before the event when interest is high.

Here is the expert strategy for capturing ephemeral web traffic: Prepare an article or blog post ahead of time for scheduled occasions, or events that you know are coming up. Then place it on your site well in advance, to give the search engines time to index it. When the time comes, your article is ready for all those eager web surfers searching for information.

Here are some examples of using the strategy:

* Write articles before seasonal holidays. For example, if your web site is about flowers, write an article on Christmas flowers, New Year flowers, and so on.

* Write on the coming of summer, autumn, winter and spring

* Use a year number, say 2008 in your article titles before the end of the 2007 year.

* Write posts ahead of forthcoming events of importance (for example, US elections)

* Write posts using keywords from Google Zeitgeist that are increasing in popularity.

Here are some other strategies that can be helpful in exploiting ephemeral niches.

It is important to know the Google indexing schedule you are on. I know I am on a weekly cycle, and my site is indexed on the weekend, because searches using keywords from new posts added during the week begin to appear on the following Monday. Make sure you put your topical post up before it is scheduled to be crawled.

Another piece of advice is not to overdo your coverage of ephemeral events. It is better to have a good post on a number of different events, than multiple posts on the same topic. Each single post will then rank highly for each ephemeral event.

Use lots of specific keywords to describe the events, using proper nouns featuring places and people in the body of the text. These words will be picked up in searches in preference to generic terms that are used in many other posts on unrelated topics.

Most importantly, plan to write your articles well ahead of the event. That gives them time to indexed by the search engine, and puts you one step ahead of your competitors.