Want the Answer Engines to Send You Traffic? Show Up in Organic

Editorial note: I originally wrote this over on the Hit Subscribe blog . When it comes to answering the question, "what causes a site to earn more answer engine traffic," I have two disparate things going for me that create a unique opportunity: A bit of academic training in, and a long professional history of, data-driven analysis of complex systems. Access to a LOT of instances of Google analytics and marketing systems of records with normalized views across them. Add to that the fact that I just recently built out some Osiris functionality to create aggregate queries across all data sets and I realized, "hey, it wouldn't be too hard to take a decent statistical look at this."  Not that I don't find endless speculating and arguing on LinkedIn to be fascinating.  I just don't trust my instincts nearly enough to guess at stuff. Let me get the spoiler out of the way quickly and then dive into specifics. Far and away the best predictor of a site earning a lot of traffic from answer engin