Lovin the Numbers

One of the main things I have done for the past 15 years at Arkansas is manage athletic department websites, including the first two versions of the combined athletic department sites. At the top of the list of things that had to be done was creating a new on-line brand -- something that was neither Hogwired.com (the former men's site -- trivia: who came up with the name and the original website?) or LadyBacks.com (the women's). That was no small battle, as the internet experts claimed there would be a tremendous loss in search engine presence if we didn't simply merge the women's pages into Hogwired.

Setting on ArkansasRazorbacks.com (mainly due to a squatter who somehow managed to fend off ICANN action over Razorbacks.com), my first response was: why would you need a lot of SEO. If you're looking for us, you pretty much type in "Arkansas" and "Razorbacks" -- aside from typos, how much simpler could it be?

Over the past two years, we've seen some big number increases. I'm very pleased with the Google Analytics that show over the last year, 8.6 million uniques with traffic up 57%. Our streaming traffic is measured separately, and that's up 293% over last year -- not bad considering we can't by SEC rules do any regular football video or men's league hoops. Page views clocking at 23.7 million.

How'd we do it? In the calendar year 2010, media relations and new media combined to post 3,351 articles, 5,390 images and 1,483 videos.

Content, baby; and lots of it.

Pooh, pooh -- it's just your BCS appearance driving the increase. Maybe, but we were up 347% in "Bowl Central" traffic from Liberty to Sugar. If you look over the past three signing days (2009-2010-2011) we are up 158% -- and we've done exactly the same presentation.

Built it, engineer it right and fill it with quality content across the board: They will come.