The main goal of any online business is to get traffic and have that convert into money. So let's say you have your new website set up and have a really good press release written by a top notch copywriter and plan on spending a good amount of money on advertising via PPC campaigns and other methods.
You get a huge surge in traffic for the first couple of days and up to a week or two at the most. You get a bunch of sales, subscribers and some good general buzz {depending on your product}. Then what happens? Your traffic slowly subsides and your ROI is going in the same direction. You stop your Ad campaigns and try to figure out what went wrong? Here is where you need to step back and take into effect everything that happened and draw up a game plan to get back into the race.
Increasing your website traffic organically
The first step you should do before you even launch is to target the niche that you are in with all kinds of keywords and phrases that you think would attract traffic to your website. If you can't think of anymore ask your friends, IM buddies, call your mom and ask her. You would be surprised to know the kind of results you get.
Don't ask them directly if they would use "so and so" keyword to search with. Instead ask them, Hey! I'm looking for "so and so" product have you searched before for it and with what keyword/phrase. You will get more honest data that way rather than if you directly ask them if your suggestion is a keyword they would use.
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So now that you have your keywords/phrases in a nice list. Work on your pages, include your meta tags, add your descriptions, play with the titles of your web pages. It is much better to have different page titles for each and every single page of your website rather than having one single title across all.
Give it time. Once the search engines know you exist they will visit you to see for updates. If you perform regular updates then your site will constantly be spidered and indexed. But once you let the frequency drag so will the indexing. Build a sitemap, you can use Google webmaster tools to see the many ways in which you can optimize your site.
When you issue your press releases include keywords in there as well and link to your site with those words. As online publishers pick it up you will get good linkbacks from those sites with those keywords.
In the time that I have spent optimizing my sites I have realized from looking at my competitors that almost all of them are trying to get on top for the same keyword. Instead I chose to go the other way round and target the lesser searched keywords and build my traffic on the back of them. After all 100 hits from an obscure keyword is better than 10 hits from a more popular keyword. So work on getting yourself known for all the "other" variations of the keyword and then build yourself up slowly for the main draw.
When people type out long drawn out phrases they are generally more serious about buying than those lazy ones who just type in 2 words and get smacked with a website that probably doesn't have the stuff they want, plus it most probably will be out of their price range.
So for instance I will take into account my site for Jeans. I get some pretty good traffic there as well as on the fashion blog, which also is highly ranked for some good keywords. The first six months of its operation I spent $5 a month on its promotion as it was more or less a part time gig. Yes, that's right $5 a month. The money I make from it is not bad either, it pays the bills. The returns were pretty good for me based on a good organic growth of the site.
The traffic has been increasing at the rate of 10 - 15 % a month and I expect it to keep getting stronger as I am paying more attention to it. It is now in the top 10 for designer denim { google } and premium denim { msn } among others. I said to myself that I want the site to gain in traffic first and then I will concentrate on more wider aspects of getting on top for more popular keywords. Right now the long drawn out phrases serve me just fine, as the site is a long term business plan I'm taking it steadily.
So if you want to have your site sustain you for longer than the initial hype, pace it out. Aim for steady organic growth from search engines. They are not going anywhere anytime soon, so chances are that people will only use them more. The more they use them the more you need to worry about making sure your site is optimized for search engine traffic and growth.
Technorati Tags: search engines, optmizing websites, blogs, making money online
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Another good method to increase traffic and site visibility is to use free advertising and link exchanges. A lot of bloggers nowadays are so amped up on ‘SEO’ and ‘viral marketing’ that they forget about this simple and efficient method. I have used a couple of these since I have been blogging and found that they bring in a good amount of traffic without requiring much upkeep or money (always an added bonus). One of the better services that I have used is http://adgridwork.com because they allow content targeting and work with both WordPress and Blogger. I’ve also dabbled with http://bla.st and found it to be a good directory as well. Hope these help.
-Nick
Hey there are using WordPress for your blog platform? I’m new to the blog world but I’m trying to get started and create my own. Do you need any html coding expertise to make your own blog? Any help would be really appreciated!