Overall Picture In Website Traffic Increase
Mar 24th, 2009 | By Kevin | Category: trafficIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Feedburner. Thanks for visiting!
I hope this article can ignite some other creative ways in your mind to increase targeted traffic for your website.
The mindset: People come to your website not because they are redirected to your website but because your website has the info that they are looking for at that point of time. Targeted traffic.
Three types of targeted traffic in my mind:
a) Practical traffic (by continuously putting useful original content and avoid website mistake, then let the word of mouth takes over from there). This kind of traffic is long-term.
b) Technical traffic (by using technical trick).
c) Marketing traffic. Do seeding and let it grow.
Focus on practical traffic first before technical traffic and marketing traffic. Visits are the not the same with visitors. It is meaningless if by technical way you get thousands of visitors but they just come for one time and will not come anymore due to the poor and stagnant content of your website.
If your website is useful, the search engine will still list your website after their robots and spiders crawl to your website long enough even if you do not have time to do marketing. And the marketing starts from there by itself. It is just a matter of time. It does not matter if the number of visits is small as long as it is solid.
Temporarily when you do not have anything useful to add to your website, you can let your mind take a break and build up technical traffic and marketing traffic.
Technical traffic (these will not work if the content of your website is poor):
a) Submit URL to search engine. Do it yourself. Do not sign up with any submitter even it is free. And try search your URL in that search engine first before submitting to see if it has listed your website by itself.
b) Make your website search engine friendly.
c) Retain your visitors.
d) Make your web pages load faster. You and the people around you may be enjoying fast Internet but there are still a lot of people who are using dialup connection, especially in those countries that the communication market is monopolized.
To make your website search engine friendly (robots or spiders crawl your website more frequently):
1) Continually add new relevant content to your website. Your own forum can help in this.
2) The relevantly longer the writing better. You do not have to break your long writing down to a few pages. Watch the word relevant here. I mean you had better just let your writing be short if you want to lengthen your writing with long-winding empty talk.
3) No dead links in your website. Actually this is common sense and I do not have to say that right?
4) Once your web page get listed by the search engine, never ever change the URL of the page. It is not friendly to both search engine and your visitors.
5) No outgoing link to any bad website.
6) Any word should be written in text. Picture words or flash words cannot be recognized by search engine.
7) Description meta tag must not be left blank and the description is related to the page. You may use the page title in the description meta tag if you do not what else to write.
8) No hidden text (except description meta tag).
9) Construct “robots.txt” file correctly so that the robots do not have to waste time crawling the unnecessary parts of your website.
Keywords meta tag is getting less important so you can just ignore it. The search engines nowadays are able to index every word on your web page.
To retain your visitors:
a) Create a forum for existing visitor to interact with each other.
b) Create a form for visitors to sign up for bi-weekly update reminder of your website. Doing this will also encourage yourself when you see people signing up.
c) RSS feed.
d) Custom a 404 error “page not found” page. You do not want to lose any visitor if somehow the page that the visitor wants to go cannot be found due to for example the mistake on the address that the visitor uses.
To make your pages load faster:
1) Do not use fancy feature like special way of page transition. You see no professional website uses that kind of thing. Remember that people go to Internet to find information, not to see your fancy feature.
2) Eliminate “whitespace” in your html codes. The mindset: to have no extra space, no indent (or tab) at all and as less lines (or returns) in html codes as possible without compromising readability. You should eliminate the whitespace manually without using any software because you know how is considered readable for yourself. But never touch the JavaScript because it may treat “return” differently.
3) Never put a table inside another table (nested table) and try not to make the whole page one big table.
4) Use cascading style sheet (CSS) if you do not always change the format of your pages.
Marketing traffic (all of these will not work if the content of your website is poor):
a) Tell your friends about your website. Create flyers to put in the mailboxes in the neighborhood or to bring along when you go out. Although the traffic generated by this is not significant but it will grow.
b) Let your URL appear as link on as many websites as possible.
To tell your friends about your website:
a) Send SMS from your phone. Actually the primary purpose of sending SMS is to keep in touch with your friends. Telling them about your website is just the side purpose.
b) Online chat.
c) Send email and forward funny stuff and include your URL. When your friends forward the funny stuff your send them, your URL will spread out. Also you may use your website email as your routine email. Some people may look out the website when they see your special email address. If any page of your website has universally useful content, you can even send the page link to everybody.
d) Post your personal profile online, such as on some friend list management websites. Never suddenly write to people who do not know you yet about your website. That is called spamming.
To let your URL appear in as link on as many website as possible (this can be categorized under technical traffic too because robots have more ways to crawl in):
a) Write relevant and useful articles to submit to blog carnival and ezine.
b) Participate in discussion in relevant forums or blogs (preferably those which rank high on the search engines for the same popular keywords as yours) by giving useful comment. People do not need you to just write “that’s great”, “well done”, “interesting” etc there. And do not ever just post your URL there because it may be immediately seen as self-promoting spam. Your posting will be wiped off and you may be banned from the forum. Please post useful comment or constructive question first before posting your URL.
c) Post testimonials for other websites in their websites.
d) Link exchange.
Two types of link exchange:
a) Link only with the websites that rank high on the search engine result for the same popular keywords as yours (related content). Contact the owner of the website to negotiate this.
b) Sign up with free link / visit exchange coordinator website. The weakness with this type of link exchange is other websites who sign up generally have the same amount of traffic like you so it may not help much. For the visit exchange some coordinators will not display your website if you do not let other member’s website that comes out randomly to load in your browser. This will generate useless hits because members will just let the website load and skip (denoted by 0-30s visit duration on your traffic stat). No targeted traffic. It is really boring that you need to view other people’s website that does not suit to the things you are finding at that point of time. For those that have categorized list of websites, you still need to allocate some time to surf member’s website to increase your ranking.
The visitors are limited to only people that have website. Because other subscribers have their own website to promote, they may not help tell their friends about your website even it is very good. No matter how good the system is, there is still possibility that the subscribers just click to let the page loads up and skip. Do this only when you have extra time after improving your website and after employing other more meaningful traffic increase methods above. It is enough to sign up with just one of such coordinator websites. Important: Talk to if the company that displays ad on your website before signup and you may need to direct this kind of traffic to the page on your website that does not contain the ad. They do not want what I call reluctant traffic. Thru the visit exchange program, other subscribers visit your website not solely because they want to but also due to they want to earn some credits (some percentage of reluctance there).
Paid ad is essential for products only (especially seasonal or impulse products people look to buy in a particular period), not website. For example if you start to produce medium voltage switchgear and want to sell your product online, you cannot just rely on the word of mouth because there are not many people who know what medium voltage switchgear is.
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SengAun Ong |
Originally from Wisconsin, I moved out to Salt Lake City over ten years ago on a six month software development contract. I now have over 15 years in software development, and was introduced to internet marketing back in 2003. During the wild west days, our business focused on content sites for Adsense revenue. As it became harder and harder to keep up with the search engines, our business has evolved, and forced us to focus on building lists and creating products. We now have a list of about 5000 interested in goal setting, and a small internet marketing list of about 500.
WOW!
Got plenty of tips there. You know i’m really frustrated right now in getting more traffic but after reading this, I’ve got plenty of reasons to head back to work and focus on the things you’ve mentioned.
Thanks for the tips Kevin!
Hope to recieve more tips from you.