Gaining Traffic
Traffic is the most important thing for any website. It’s your visitors that generate revenue by clicking on your adsense ads, by following your affiliate links to make a purchase or purchasing products from your website. It is very important to build up traffic to your site if you want it to generate any amount of money.
There are a lot of services around that web that guarantee increased traffic. I however steer clear of any paid services that claim to generate traffic because with a little work you can generate unlimited amounts of traffic yourself for free. I’m talking about what is known as SEO (search engine optimization) or what I like to call website publicity. Generating free organic traffic to your site doesn’t cost money, it just takes time and effort.
I’m not going to go into lengthy details on SEO. I’m just going to give you quick tips on what you can do to start generating traffic to your site in your spare time. Of course the more effort you put into it the more traffic you can generate. Just remember more traffic equals more revenue.
So what is SEO? SEO is simply optimizing your website in a way that moves it towards the top of the search results when people search any major search engine. If your site is in the top 10 listings say on Google then you will be guaranteed traffic, depending of course on how many people are searching for your given keyword per month.
Your websites theme will dictate the keywords your site will be found under. If your site is about web hosting then that would be your main keyword. Other keywords related to web hosting would then follow and there are literally hundreds of keywords for any given topic. Keywords are just that. The Key Words that people will find your site under.
If they search Google or Yahoo then your site should show up for those keywords. Getting your site to show up for those keywords is key in gaining traffic from the search engines. Once you get to the top spots all the traffic is free, highly targetted and is thee very best traffic any site could get.
When I’m optimizing my website for the search engines this is what I do.
First I do a little research. I try and find out keywords to use and figure out how many people are searching for them each month. With that information I do quick searches on Google to find out how much competition there is also known as keyword analysis. If a keyword only gets 100 searches a month but there are 100 million websites competing for that keyword then it’s not really going to pay off if your in the #1 spot on Google. So you have to figure out what you can achieve and where to spend your time. Longer keywords or what are known as “long tail keyphrases” are easier to optimize for and are just as lucrative because people searching for very specific things are usually in the mood to buy or take action if they find exactly what they are looking for. A long tail keyphrase is something like “cheap webhosting with cpanel control panel” or “affordable hotel rooms in las vegas”. The longer the keyword the less competition there usually is and the easier it is to get to the top spots on Google, Yahoo or MSN.
Here are some tools I use to do keyword research.
Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool – Search for any keyword and it will give you a number of searches performed in a previous month. Perfect for seeing what the most popular keywords are and also shows what the less popular keywords are.
Wordtracker – Wordtracker is a paid subscription keyword service that allows you to do much more extensive keyword research.
Keyword Discovery – another great keyword research service that offers a great set of keyword tools.
Overture’s free keyword tool is perfect if you are just getting started and want to get keyword ideas. Plus it’s free. I wouldn’t recommend paying for a keyword service unless you’re really serious about using keywords to generate niche traffic. Again it’s just about how much time, money and effort you want to invest. Try the Overture tool first and then move onto paid keyword research tools as you grow.
Since you purchased a website from me you are off to a great start as every site I build is already search engine friendly and most likely already has Pagerank and receives traffic. Now you just have to continue to build it up to get the most out of it.
How to use the keywords you’ve found for your website.
Once you have a good list of keywords to use in your website you have to figure out where and how you will use them in your content to drive traffic to those pages. If you have a blog you can easily create posts using those keywords in the title and body of your post. You should follow keyword density guidelines to some degree to make sure your keyword is spread throughout your content. You don’t always have to use the keywords you’ve found during research. Simply staying focused on the main topic of your website is sometimes enough. Write or have content written that relates to your main topic. The more content you have the better.
Gaining Inbound Links
Links to your website are crucial to where your site shows up on the search engines. The more high quality links you have the higher your site will be when people search for keywords you’ve used in your site. The search engines view links as votes. You might have heard of the term “link popularity”. This basically translates to: the more links you have the more popular your site is. Without links your site is dead. So you have to increase the amount of links pointing to your site to increase your traffic. There are several ways to do this.
You can either exchange links with other webmasters or you can get one-way links through various methods. One way links are by far superior to trading links because you are not bleeding Pagerank off your website onto someone else’s. One-way links to your site tell the search engines that another webmaster thought your site was so good that they linked to you by their own will. You didn’t have to coax them into linking to you by giving them a link back. You won’t always be able to get people to freely link to you so sometimes exchanging links is the only method. Feel free to do this but maintain a sense of precaution as exchanging too many links can get your website penalilzed.
Ok, so what can you do to gain one-way inbound links?
Gaining high quality one-way links isn’t as hard as some people might have you think. With a little research and work you can gain a lot of great one-way links to your site helping you gain more traffic, build up your Pagerank and essentially generate more revenue. Here’s where to start:
Online Forums: Do some research on any online forums that are related to your websites topic. Join those forums and simply place links to your site in your signature. Most forums today offer the ability to put links in your signature and you can freely advertise your site like this as well as get one-way links to your site. The more you post obviously the more times your links will show up but make sure you use diligence when posting on other people’s forums. You actually want to become a friendly and respected member of the community so don’t go posting useless info just to get your links up. You don’t want to get banned alltogether.
Blogs: Do some more research on any of the major search engines for blogs related to your website. You will most likely find many people with blogs related to yours. Read through the posts and comment on anything that you find interesting. Again use diligence and only leave relevant comments. During commenting you can leave your websites URL. Again the more you do this the more links you can gain back to your site.
Article Directories: You can submit articles to article directories for other webmasters to use on their websites. To use your articles they have to keep your author bio intact at the bottom of every article. You simply place a few of your website links in your bio section and when other webmasters publish them they will be linking directly back to your site. Don’t worry if you don’t know how or what to write. Simply post a job on any freelance website such as elance.com, guru.com, scriptlance.com etc with a job for a few articles. Give the freelancer your topic to write on and you can usually get nice 500+ word articles for pretty cheap. They are definetely worth the money as your article will most likely be published by multiple site owners sometimes hundreds. You can find people to write articles for as little as $5 a piece. Once you have your articles submit them to the article directories. Here is just a few:
http://www.authorconnection.com
http://www.netterweb.com/articles/articlesubmit.htm
http://www.boconline.com/sub-art.htm
http://www.dime-co.com/articlesub.html
http://www.freesticky.com/stickyweb/submit.asp
http://www.web-source.net/article_submissions.htm
http://ezinearticles.com/add_url.html
http://www.howtoadvice.com/Submit
Social Bookmarking Sites: You can bookmark your own websites on every major social bookmarking site there is. You have to create a free account first then simply start bookmarking. You can bookmark several pages of your website if you want but again use diligence as you don’t want to be accused of link spamming. Here is a small list of social bookmarking sites you can use:
Furl - Del.ic.ous – Smarking – Simpy – Jots – BlogMarks – Scuttle – Blinklist – -Blogmemes – Bloglines – SocialBookmarking – Searchles – Reddit – Shadows – Co.mments
Testimonials: If you have ever used a product or service online that you love why not send a testimonial to the webmaster saying how much you loved their product. To make the testimonial look credible webmasters will usually include a link back to your site. This is yet another easy way to get more one-way links.
The Importance of Link Text
To make the most of these free methods of gaining one-way links you must use keywords in your link text. The text used in links tells the search engines what your site is about so use keywords that are related to your site. Also, don’t always link just to your homepage. Link deep into your site. Webmasters often link to subpages or subdomains of websites not just to the homepage. The more specific a link is often the better. If your site is about weddings and you have a page on your site named “unique wedding favors” get links to that page with that link text. The keyword “unique wedding favors” is a pretty popular keyword and to rank high on say Google for that keyword you need a lot of one-way links pointing to your site with that exact link text.
Building Pagerank
Once you work on gaining links to your site your Pagerank will naturally grow. The higher your Pagerank the higher Google will place your site amongst it’s results. Pagerank is achieved solely by links pointed to your site. The more links you have the higher your Pagerank will be. Pagerank is basically like electricity. It flows in the same fashion. Pagerank is passed from one site to another in varying amounts. The higher the Pagerank a website has the more juice or electricity it has to pass onto you. This is why webmasters are always looking for links from sites with a lot of pagerank. You can and will pass on Pagerank to other websites when you link out to people. The more you link out the more Pagerank you will pass and the less you will have. If you want to keep your PR high then link out less and gain more one-way links. Your websites structure is also important for passing PR through your website.
Increasing Revenue
Once your traffic continues to build you want to monetize it as much as possible. You can do this through displaying ads in a way that they get the highest visibility. Placing ads such as adsense above the sites fold is important for increasing your CTR (click through ratio). If you are relying on adsense for revenue then you want to display the maximum amount of ads as possible (currently 3 text ad blocks per page along with 1 link ad unit). You will also want to place the ads throughout your content so as to make it blend in. The less they look like ads the better. If you have a blog then you will want to place ads in every single post that is not displayed on the homepage. Remember not to go over the ad display limit. You will also want to make sure the links in adsense or even your affiliate ads are blue. Blue underlined links are the most recognized standard for links.
Using pictures next to adsense or affiliate links draws attention to them and increases click throughs. There is such a thing as banner blindness so using the standard 468×60 banner ads is not recommended. People have been so bombarded with this type of advert that they simply look past any ads in that size. Use text links whenever possible only displaying photos if they are relevant to your site and draw specific attention to an accompanying text link.
Only display relevant ads. Don’t try and push products that are not related to your websites main topic. You will have the most luck advertising products that are related to your sites content.
With the information above you should be able to generate more revenue from your website and I wish you the best of luck. There is a lot more information throughout this website that I encourage you to read. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.
Other Related Topics
- Search Engine Optimization – More info on SEO.
- Online Marketing – Overview of online marketing.
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