Most stats for the site seem OK (though there is a place for improvement). The exception is the number of site visits, i.e. traffic.
How can we increase the traffic?
Note that a considerable part of the traffic should eventually come from search engines. An important factor for traffic is the rank of the site on Google and other search engines.
What can we do to bring the site to Google front page when searching for relevant expressions?
Summer is about to end :( and a lot of you will be returning to universities and colleges. I think that's an excellent opportunity to promote CS.SE to your fellow students and professors.
We could create a "student how-to" introductory Meta question, something along the lines of "I'm a CS student, how can I make the most of this site" that you describe some of the basics of the site, link to the FAQ and explain why it's important, the site's homework policy, etc.
This is probably more relevant to the Ideas for promoting the site question, but I posted it here as I think September and October, the two months students return to universities can be very important to the site traffic wise.
Thoughts?
If you are familiar with reddit, the Computer Science and algorithms subreddits are definitely worth checking out and can help bring some traffic our way. Few days ago I shared two questions there and the results were:
Pro tips:
Do not flood /r/compsci with questions.
If you start sharing anything and everything on reddit, the community there will get bored soon. Sharing our quality content with the world is a good thing, getting labelled as obnoxious spammers is not. Be careful not to flood the relatively low traffic subreddit with CS.SE questions, or you might end up ousted from their community.
Reddit has helpful domain pages that track what content was posted posted from each domain, and it already has one for CS.SE. You can check it to see if the question you want to share has already been posted (in which case please don't post it), or to see when was the last CS.SE question shared. It would be smart to wait a day or two before posting another CS.SE question, other than not boring the crowd there, you really don't want massive traffic spikes every day.
Only share quality content
Please avoid sharing bikeshed, trivial and/or soft questions. When sharing content on a third party site you are acting as an ambassador of the CS.SE community, concentrate on sharing quality questions that show you are not yet another CS forum on the internet, but a high quality Q&A site.
It is funny that we should be interested in increasing traffic, while closing interesting questions that might generate such traffic. For example, this one closed recently:
Is Category Theory useful for learning functional programming?
I thought I would edit to make it less controversial, but no such option exists.
Note added: The point I am making is that we need to be more open to open-ended and, perhaps, softer questions. This site is not for researchers, unlike cstheory.stackexchange. A question like the one above will be of general interest and will bring in readers. It will also give us an opportunity to show off the knowledge base that exists among our expert answerers.
This is a very important topic. Let me note that some queries already place cs.SE content reasonably high, for instance "prove language not context-free" (duckduckgo, Google) and "why is quicksort fast" (duckduckgo). I assume the situation is similar (and improving) for other popular questions.
Another observation is that when we had a huge spike of visits due to a tweet and/or reddit, some of them stuck. Ever since that peek, our average number of visits has been higher (from around 300 to around 350). That suggests that we have something to offer and people come again once they know of us at all.
In general terms, we want
The two items are strongly intertwined: better questions mean better answers mean more exposure mean more people with questions. In order to achieve these, we have to
Again, these issues are not independent.
In order to be known, we have be visible for our target group. Search queries may be able to do that to some extent in the future, but right now we rely on word of mouth. We have to literally spread the word when talking with colleagues and friends, posting content on the web and attending meetings. Some people will do that casually because they had a good experience, others will put in honest effort because they care about the site as a whole.
In order to be searchable, we have to be linked (by important sites), plain and simple. Other than waiting for satisfied users to link to us, what can we as core community do? I think we can mainly inject links to our good content in other communities, for instance other Stack Exchange site, Wikipedia, newsgroups, social networks, etc. Other than that, we have to work on the first item and rely on the powers of the crowd: if it is good, they will link it.
One issue I personally have with advertising is a lack of brand. We have no logo, no pitch phrase, no nothing. I am considering to initiate an effort to develop prototypical elements we can put on (website) banners, posters, powerpoint slides, shirts, stickers, you name it. I think I could motivate more than one professor to plug our site, but for that we need a memorable presentation. What do you think about that?
One issue I have no solution for is language. I would expect native speakers of other major languages (Spanish, French, Mandarin, even German) -- especially pupils and undergrads, maybe also practitoners -- to search in their own language. They won't find us this way. So we have to put extra effort into advertisement to non-English folks. Maybe blog articles in several languages pointing here can help?
Furthermore, note that most of our questions fall into TCS. This is probably natural as students tend to struggle most in TCS, and we have more experts in TCS than in other subfields. However, relatively few people are deeply interested in theory so it stands to reason that we can expand our audience considerably by widening our practiced scope (in defined scope does include all CS).
This is kind of a hokey suggestion, but it might be worth creating some questions which address the most common Computer Science questions for things that don't fall in SO. These could range a lot in difficulty, but the more of these common questions are here with quality answers, the more people will stumble across the site via google.
The trick here is that someone will likely be asking questions they already know the answer to. Heck, they might even get a better answer than what they knew before!
