This talk sizzled. Dave Taylor, one of Boulder’s most widely read bloggers and a regular teacher at Boulder Digital Arts, gave a talk on “10 Easy Tips for Driving Traffic to Your Site” at BDA’s Open House for their lovely new home on Range St. Saturday, April 24.

It was damn good advice for anyone running a blog, a webzine or even an enterprise website — delivered with Taylor’s usual fast pacing, wit and widsom. Here are his 10 tips, followed by a link to a streamable or downloadable MP3 audio of the talk. We think that slides from the talk are forthcoming, to be posted here, too.

Taylor’s 10 tips — backward, Letterman-style

10. Make use of keywords
9. Create controversy
8. Cover local events
7. Create emumerated lists
6. Create Meetups and meetings
5. Create a blog or, better, contribute to an existing blog
4. Create great titles
3. Submit content to article directories
2. Optimize your site for the search engines
1. Participate in your market

To sum it all up, said Taylor: “Understand your customer and meet their needs.” A recurring theme of his talk was that website creators need to deliver the goods — the information that’s needed by the people they hope to do business with.

Taylor’s BDA classes are just a few among hundreds offered at what has become Boulder’s headquarters for pithy, professionally useful and affordable training for everything related to graphic arts and the Internet (see upcoming classes). The two proud creators of burgeoning BDA, Bruce Borowsky and Zach Daudert, were on hand at Saturday’s Open House.

When not publishing his blogs, Taylor runs a web strategy consulting business, Intuitive Systems, and also consults through Metzger Associates.

Slides from talk

Here are the slides from Dave’s talk in PDF format, available for you to download.

Audio of talk

Dave Taylor’s tips for boosting your website (MP3, 28 min 21 sec)
(Click to play, right-click to download)