Archive for 'Search Engines'

Tips to Get Repeat Web Traffic

Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 4:21 am  
Leave your comment

If you want to get repeat web traffic (and who doesn't?), you should try the following techniques:

  1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated. This is much more important for static HTML pages (as opposed to blogs, where content is assumed to be freshened up quite frequently).
  2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.
  3. You can allow customers to 'opt in' to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to 'opt in' to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.
  4. Add a link to your primary page with a script 'Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites'.
  5. Add a link 'Recommend this site to a Friend' so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, "Thought you might be interested in this", just by clicking on it.
  6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a 'Contact Us' link on each page.
  7. Create a 'Our Policies' page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.
  8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.
  9. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.
  10. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to 'opt out' of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive. This "bookkeeping" is unnecessary with a quality 3rd-party email list database provider like Aweber.

List Building Blocks #1 — How to Add New Subscribers with SEO Articles

Sunday, October 18th, 2009 at 4:23 am  
Leave your comment

Your articles serve many purposes, such as establishing you as an expert, pre-selling products and even helping to build relationships with your prospects. But you can also use them to drive traffic to your site when you take the time to optimize them for the search engines.

Here’s the 3S Strategy for creating and distributing optimized articles:

  • Search
  • Sprinkle
  • Share

Read on for the details…


Step #1: Search

Your first step is to search for the keywords your market is already using to find information in your niche. You do this by using a keyword tool (such as Google’s free keyword tool, WordTracker.com or even Market Samurai).

All you have to do is enter in a broad niche-relevant search term like "homeschooling," "organic gardening" or "golf." The tool will then offer you suggestions for related search terms which you can use to expand your list of keywords. In most cases, you’ll generate a list of hundreds if not thousands of possible keywords.

What you’re searching for are longtail keywords – these are phrases that are typically four or more words long. The key is that they have very little competition in the search engines, which means you can rank well for them.

Tip: Many keyword tools check the competition for you. For example, WordTracker offers a KEI (keyword effectiveness index) value, which looks at the number of searches against how many other websites are indexed for that keyword. The higher the KEI value, the better chance you have of ranking well. Look for words that have a KEI value of at least 100 – but the higher the better.


Step #2: Sprinkle

Once you’ve compiled a list of longtail keywords, your next step is to create content around these keywords. You can optimize each article for two keyword phrases if you like, but generally it’s easier to optimize for just one.

The key is to not stuff your article with your keywords, otherwise the search engines may rank it lower (rather than higher). As such, include your keyword in the title of your article as well as about two to three times for every 100 words of content.

Example: Let’s say your keyword is "hydroponic vegetable gardening indoors." Your article might look like this:

Title: "Tips and Tricks for Hydroponic Vegetable Gardening Indoors"
Intro: include keyword at least once.
Hydroponic Vegetable Gardening Indoors Tip #1: explain tip and include keyword once more.
Hydroponic Vegetable Gardening Indoors Tip #2: explain tip and include keyword once more.
Hydroponic Vegetable Gardening Indoors Tip #3: explain tip and include keyword once more.
Closing: Summarize the article and include keyword once more.

Step #3: Share

Once your article is complete, it’s time to share it by distributing it as widely as possible. Don’t worry about so-called "duplicate content." The search engines won’t punish you if they find your articles in more than one place. They only knock you down a bit if they find your content in more than one place within your own domain (i.e., not on other sites).

You do this by:

  • Posting the article on your blog
  • Offering it as a guest post on your JV partner’s blog (or newsletter)
  • Create a Squidoo.com or HubPages.com page around it
  • Post it on social networking sites like your MySpace.com blog or Facebook.com page
  • Submit it to article directories such as EzineArticles.com, IdeaMarketers.com, ArticleValley.com, GoArticles.com and Buzzle.com

That’s it. You too can get your articles to pull in search engine traffic for you when you use the Search, Sprinkle and Share system.

Your next step is easy — take action by searching for your keywords to find joint venture partners.

Just in case you stumbled on this post (and you haven’t signed up for the full, free course), sign up below. All I need to get you started is your first name and email address.

 

Traffic-Building 101: Backlinks

Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 5:32 am  
Leave your comment

The most important thing you must do in your online endeavors is get people to read what you write. You can have the absolute best product, most compelling content, or most valuable information available, but if you don’t have traffic, you won’t be successful.

Let me define “successful” for a moment. Success is your objective. It’s whatever you want it to be. It might be quitting your day job and running your own online business. It may be supplementing your income. Or it may be becoming famous.

Or it might just be getting 100 RSS subscribers. Or a 1000.

Whatever.

“Success” means whatever you want it to mean.

However, none of that will occur without getting people to your site. Of course, you could buy a bunch of traffic with Pay-Per-Click ads, but that traffic may not be well-targeted and it will most likely be short-lived.

One of the tried-and-true traffic-building tactics is to build your “backlinks.” A backlink is a link back to your site from another site. It’s a referral, so to speak. If somebody puts a link to one of your posts on her site, then she’s, in effect, endorsing it.

The search engines give a lot of weight to backlinks. Not only the number but the relevance. However, the number means a lot. In short, comparing two similar blogs side-by-side, we’ll see the blog with the higher number of backlinks rank higher in the search engines for a given search term.

So, you want to build your backlinks. But how? There are a few ways:

  • Ask. Generally, if you propose to a webmaster a “link exchange,” most will comply. It’s tit-for-tat: You put up my link and I’ll put up yours. This tactic used to be very successful, but nowadays it seems to have a little less effect than a true one-way endorsement. By the way, this link exchange is also known as a reciprocal link.
  • Comment. If you make a comment on a blog and you get the opportunity to fill in a “web site information” field in the comments form, do so! Comments are generally moderated by the web owner or administrator so the search engines view a posted comment as a (weak, but effective) endorsement by the site. Commenting on blogs is highly effective.
  • Write articles for Article Directories like ezinearticles, goarticles, or SearchWarp. In these articles, you write compelling “useful but incomplete” (thanks, Jimmy Brown) information with a link to your web site or a specific web page (your subscribe page is ideal — you can build your email list this way). This serves as a valid backlink. Plus, since your article is syndicated, web publishers can re-publish your article in dozens, even hundreds or thousands, of places. This can directly drive a lot of traffic to your site, especially if your article is picked up by a big site.
  • You can comment in forums, too. Just be careful. Forums became big SPAM sites, so many forum moderators will not only delete your posts if they consider them “too SPAMMY,” but they might also ban you from the forum! However, do some “lurking” in the forum you wish to post to beforehand to see what is acceptable. Read the Terms, too! Finally, ask questions and get involved before you make your “pitch.”
  • Finally, there are “backlink building” tools and resources available that either automate some or all of the above (and more) or they give you sites where dropping a link back to your site is relatively easy.

Angela’s Easy Backlink Builder is a good example of the latter. Each month, her service provides you with 30 high Page Rank (a Google term) sites on which you can post your link back to your site (remember, link back to your subscribe page or to a page you want to get out there WITH a subscribe form on the page itself — you want to build your email list, too).

It can be difficult to process all 30 sites in one month.

Here’s a trick: Automate it (as much as possible) using a “form filler” like RoboForm or LastPass. Both of these utilities are known as password keepers, but they have excellent form-filling capabilities.

For example, typing in all the information to register at a site and then filling in your backlink information MANUALLY can take anywhere from 5-10 minutes. With RoboForm (the tool I use), it takes about 30 seconds. Angela sends each month’s backlinks in 4-6 packets. I do one packet at a time. In a few days, I can get the whole thing done.

Now, it’s a $5 a month service. First packet is free. The big question is, how many backlinks do you need?

I’d say 30 from a month’s worth of packets is a great start. Using the other methods listed above in conjunction with “backlink building,” you can get a ton of quality links back to your site in a couple of months. Your rankings in the search engines should rise pretty rapidly.

Build in quality, original content, and you’ve got a winning recipe for getting readers to your site. Next step, of course, is building relationships with your readers. How do you do that? That’s a topic for another story!

List Building 101 Tip #1

Sunday, August 30th, 2009 at 2:07 pm  
Leave your comment

This content is fully accessible by:

As a special bonus, I'm giving you 101 daily tips on how to make a better email marketing list.

I'm going to give you — literally — 101 tips on building a responsive email marketing list.

That is to say, I will help you build a list of ready, willing, and able prospects!

How does that sound?

*** Here's your first one *** {{{List_Building_101|premium}}}

Tip #1 — Build Your Own Business While there is a lot to be said for getting to the top of the search engines and advertising to promote your business, there’s nothing like having your own list.

A list is something that you control at all times.

You control:

  • Its size
  • Your relationship with members
  • How much money you make

By having a list, you are building your business on solid ground.

That's not to say that search engine traffic isn't wonderful and you should quit advertising. However, developing a list of leads or customers can be worth much more to you in the long run when combined with both of those methods of traffic.

If you need a killer email list manager, look no further than Aweber. It's economical, reliable, and easy to use!

Building Traffic Part 1

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 2:32 pm  
Leave your comment

In a post entitled, Traffic Building Ideas, I listed out a bunch of traffic-building ideas that you could use to boost the number of users visiting your site. Today, I’ll talk about traffic-building in general: The How and the Why.

First, the Why. Why do you care about traffic? Whether you write for pure pleasure or you have a website to generate income, you want your voice to be heard, your words to be read, your message to be received. The more people you get to your site, the better your chances of getting your point across. It’s really just that simple.

Of course, if you have a website so that you can sell things (information, services, or physical products like books and music), you want targeted traffic. This means you want visitors to stop by who are ready, willing, and able to buy whatever it is that you’re selling.

In any event, you want to boost your traffic numbers. That’s the Why.

Now, the How. In my last post about building traffic, you saw that there are many ways to get people to visit your site. In fact, that post only mentioned a fraction of ways to reach more people.

However, there is one common thread among all of those methods, and it is this: Anybody who gets to your site got there through a referral.

Read that again. I’ll wait.

Nobody got to your site by randomly typing in letters and numbers in their browser URL address bar. They all got there through a referral.

Now, that referral could have come from a search engine, a link on somebody else’s site, an ad you put up, your signature line in an email you sent, or through a link you put in a resource box in an article you submitted to a directory.

Search engines, by the way, are an attempt to chronicle this referral system in such a way that when you type something in a search form, you will get back a set of results that is most beneficial to you. The web is all about finding information that you can put to use. That’s what the search engines care about.

If you typed in “internet marketing,” for example, in Google, you should get a list of sites that are “authority sites” about internet marketing. You should not get a site about dog training, even if internet marketing is mentioned all throughout the site.

This is why in-context referrals are one of the best sources of traffic. Not only is somebody recommending your site to its visitors, but Google, Yahoo, Bing, and all the other search engines regard (or at least should, in my opinion) that link as more important than a banner, advertisement, or some other referral.

Most of your website traffic will come through the search engines, by the way. But it is those relevant links that pushes your website toward the top of the search engines because the SEs value them more than links in a blogroll or embedded in an ad.

In my next traffic-building post, I’ll get into the specific how-tos for one of the methods mentioned in Traffic Building Ideas. As this series progresses, I will touch on most, if not all, of these traffic-building methods.

 Page 2 of 2 « 1  2