When many websites experience low page views during the summer, LA Times quietly achieved a massive traffic of 127 million page views during July. This is 7 million more than its May record and 66% growth from its previous year.
LA Times credits its success to its search engine optimization it carries out. Mentioning in its press release, “Latimes.com keeps getting better at SEO (search engine optimization), which means our stories are ranking higher in Google and other search engines.” The release also added, “We are also performing better on sites like Digg.com. All that adds up to more exposure and more readership than ever before.”
The huge traffic has also helped bring up some of its top categories like the “Breaking News” and “Multimedia” to the finals of Online Journalism Awards.
Some of the most read articles in July were the Jackson’s Obama comments which went unnoticed and the earthquake in the L.A area. In addition many blogs like Top of the Ticket and The Dish Rag have hugely contributed to the traffic on July.