Increasing Your Websites Traffic

Many people and businesses believe that traffic is just going to appear when they have a website built and activated. This is usually not the case. The accessibility of the internet has created this misnomer that “if you build it they will come”. There have been many aspiring online business people that have found out this reality the hard way. You can have a great looking site and a great product, and still have no online traffic. It takes work and patience to increase your website traffic.
All websites on the world wide web are unique. They each have a different URL address and in most cases offer different products, information and/or services. Even though there are differences, the one thing they have in common is traffic. Internet surfers can visit your site through many different portals that can usually be categorized under one of four online “entry-ways”:

1) Organic Search Traffic - results when a word or phrase is typed into a search engine or directory and the searcher selects a result of the query. There are no fees associated with organic search traffic once the website has been made search engine friendly. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a service that is underutilized by many website builders and owners because it is not well understood or they are just unaware that such a concept exists. Websites without basic SEO will have a poor search ranking, negatively effecting their websites potential traffic. SEO is an investment into your businesses website, the better your SEO the higher you will rank, driving more traffic to your website.

2) Site Linkage - is traffic generation from an affiliated site, through a link that website has referring to your site. It is only beneficial for your website to do this if your linked sites are not in direct competition with you. By working on this over time, you can build site linkage traffic that will pay off for increased traffic long term. Some of the more popular sites will charge a fee for site linkage or ask for a reciprocal link on your site. The advantage of site linkage is its low cost, while the disadvantages are that it can take some time to set up, expand, and keep current and some website owners prefer not to have reciprocal links.

3) Paid Traffic - can include any number of online marketing campaigns, such as Pay-Per-Click(PPC) advertising, banner advertising, and e-mail mailing campaign. These traffic generators are great for quick guarantee website traffic and you can spend as much as your budget allows. The drawbacks are they can be very expensive compared to your Return on Investment (ROI) and they only generate traffic for as long as you pay the fee(s).

4) Direct Traffic - is from internet surfers who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or typed your site URL into their browser. Direct traffic can include visitors recruited via offline (i.e. print, television) campaigns. Media campaigns are usually very expensive and they only generate traffic as long as you are advertising.

As you can see, there are many ways to increase your website’s traffic, but most of them take some work, some money and some patience. The only guarantee in website traffic is that if you do not do anything, the lack of effort will be reflected in the small amount of traffic to your website.

Ted Moore Internet Traffic SEO Consultant

Tracking Your Website Traffic

You may have a custom-designed website that has been search engine optimized, good Pay-Per-Click, and a banner ad campaign in place. So why should you care about tracking your website traffic? One argument would be if you do not know where your traffic is coming from, your advertising budget is not being spent effectively and appropriately.
In reality, a small percentage of website owners, and managers actually track the traffic on their website. Some of the larger businesses may appear that they have an endless supply of funds for advertising, but every company, regardless of size, has a limited amount of money they can spend on advertising. With any limited advertising budget, maximizing the Return of Investment (ROI) is critical.
So how can website tracking maximize your ROI? The answer is simple. With the right tracking in place, the information available to the website owners is amazing. For example:

• location (city, country or continent) of the internet surfer
• times of day your site is being visited
• the connection speed and browser being used
• the specific pages they are surfing
• the number of pages they are surfing
• the length of time they are spending on your site

Information on unique and return visitors is also available, as well as the bounce rate(one page viewers) of your site. But, by far the most important information that tracking will identify is where your traffic is coming from.
With the proper tracking in place, it will tell you what site link your internet surfer used to visit your site. This will tell you whether that banner ad you are paying for is really bringing in an appropriate amount of traffic. Furthermore, it can tell you it may be time to make a change if you are sharing reciprocal links with another site and are not seeing any increased traffic. Since there are many ways to use all this information to stretch your advertising dollar, it really is invaluable. By knowing where your traffic originated, it tells you what method of advertising is working and what is not.
Good website tracking should give the website owner information on all the organic searches that brought visitors to their particular site. These are search queries that people used on search engines or directories that brought traffic to your site. It will tell you the exact search phrase or word used and on what search engine the query was made. This is very advantageous when it comes to Search Engine Optimization(SEO). Once you have collected enough tracking data, you will know what keywords and phrase are working the best and which are not, as well as which search engines you are popular on and the ones that do not know who you are.
For a reasonable price, many different tracking programs can be set-up on your website. Some have different information than others. C-Panel tracking stats are very industrial and not that user friendly, but they are usually free if you have C-Panel access. Analytics used to cost several hundreds of dollars a year, but since Google has taken them over, the service is now free as well. Google Analytics are much more user friendly and easy to set-up if you know a little bit about HTML. There may be a small fee to initially set-up your site with tracking, but once the code is established most tracking programs are free to use for as long as you need them.
It is certainly very beneficial to spend some time and effort in tracking what your website visitors are doing on your site. It will allow you to understand your website visitors and maximize your advertizing budget.

Ted Moore Internet Traffic SEO Consultant

When marketing a web site the single most important factor (once any obvious on-site obstacles have been resolved) is "links".  They are just as important as content, more so if you consider that your content will not be seen without first being found, either by way of search, or the links themselves.

As site managers, our objective is to use links to "vote" so the search engines will show our site for the term being targeted.  The question is; which is more important, quality links, or a lot of links?

The recent Google index update (dubbed the Jagger update Oct 2005) has many webmasters very upset that their site appears to have dropped from the SERPS (search engine result pages).  They fell off for several reasons, either they were using deceitful practices (which seem to have become more strict during this update -hidden text, hidden links, etc) or they were counting on their huge link campaigns to float them to the finish line.  In other words, having many links from sites that are not relevant and are not authority pages.

Our definition of an authority page is:

    It shows up for a search term

    It has some page rank (hopefully a 5 or greater)

    It is re-indexed often (it's cache date is recent).

    It has back-links from sites other than it's own domain.

For a long time now people have been using link-exchange as their primary course of action to increase link popularity.  This generates many links with your preferred anchor text in each, distributed across many domains.  This is "quantity", having many links.

When running a campaign the competitions overall links are considered.  Knowing some things about the sites that show up in the top 3 positions is critical.  How many links do they have is where many people stop.  A successful campaign will consider many other factors, such as:

    How many unique domain links?

    How many of those links have the target phrase in anchor?

    If the pages that link to your site are relevant:

        Do they have the phrase in the title?

        Is the content on that page focused around the target phrase?

        Does it show up for the target phrase in the SERP?

        Do others link to that page with that anchor?

    How many links are on the page?

    What is page rank of the page?

    How recent is the cache date?

Some have said these efforts are too extensive, and bear no fruit.  However the Jagger update dropped those sites that did not make any of these considerations.  Including sites that have 800 unique domain links with solid anchor density.  Why is that? Probably because the concept behind google's ranking revolves around the idea of "reference", just as a college paper is considered important if many future college papers refer to it.  How natural those references are is somewhat difficult for Google to determine, all except link exchanges, those are quite easy for Google to see and dismiss (or lower their overall weight).

As one puts forth the effort to obtain 10 link-exchanges, they could have put forth the same effort and obtained 2 or more alternative links.  Links that meet the criteria.  A link for the sake of having a link is no longer as valuable.  We feel a link-exchange link is now 10 times less powerful.

Scenario A) 4 links (we'll call them "natural links") on relevant pages, pages that are cached often, have no more than 5 outbound links, and have page rank of 5, with two of those links containing the {target-phrase} in the anchor text, the other two having the  phrase   {phrase-target} in the anchor text will deliver more results.

Scenario B) 40 links from irrelevant pages, that have an old cache date, PR no greater than 2, and 30+ outbound links.  Having the phrases be just as scattered across each 40 as the above in anchor.

We have found that until now Scenario B was credible. We have observed that many of the campaigns that use this method as their primary method of ranking  have dropped off the SERPS.  They are sites that have been on the first page for years, using nothing but link exchanges and directory participation as their primary means of link building; with very few sponsored links to hold their weight.

Those campaigns that set aside a substantial amount of their marketing budget for sponsored links each month have remained.  Actually, they've increased, mostly because the competitors that used Scenario B dropped off, leaving room in top positions for their site.

One way, relevant links from pages that have Page Rank are cached often from authority pages (not necessarily sites that are authority, but pages that show up for a search term), have won Google over and are now a requirement for any competitive phrase.

Getting to the top for a phrase is well worth the time, it's worth money to the client.  It has a direct impact on their bottom line the first month they begin showing up for the term.  The growth potential of a company can now be directly related to how high they are in the SERP for a competitive term that is searched often.  As you begin to rank higher and higher your competitors must spend to get above you, if you are higher and can stay higher you may just force them to spend more than they have and price them out of the market.

These are just some of the small factors that Phoenix Synergy considers when running a campaign.

  Adam Yax CTO of http://PhoenixSynergy.com

View all articles by Adam Yax

Pay-Per-Click Advertising How it fits into your Internet marketing strategy

Ian Lurie, Portent Interactive, Seattle, WA
December 29, 2003

Pay-per-click marketing is a great way to get visitors when you need traffic and you need it now. But it's risky: You can spend a fortune, generate many visits, and end up with nothing to show for it. This article will provide you with a high-level view of pay per click marketing, provide some general strategies and provide an example of what to do, and what not to do.


What is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?

On its face, pay-per-click marketing, or PPC, is pretty simple: Search engines and services, such as Google or Overture, provide listings on a per-bid basis. This is in addition to their 'natural' search results, which are still powered by a combination of keywords found on your site, link popularity and other formulae.

If you place the highest bid for a specific keyword or set of keywords, then you rank number one in these paid listings. On Google, , PPC listings show up in the Adwords column on the right-hand side of the screen. Other engines, such as MSNSearch or Yahoo, display P P C listings as 'sponsored listings' in the same column as the natural search results.

If someone clicks on your PPC listing, they arrive at your web site. And you are charged the amount you bid. So, if you bid $.15 per click on 'widgets', and that's the highest bid, you'll show up first in line. If 100 people click on your P P C listing, then the search engine or PPC service will charge you $15.00.


Why PPC Advertising is Bad

But PPC advertising can cost a fortune. It's easy to get caught up in a bidding war over a particular keyphrase and end up spending far more than your potential return. Some PPC engines, such as Overture, offer convenience features such as 'autobid' that will automatically increase your bid amount to maintain a particular rank. That sounds great on its face, but it can get expensive in a big hurry.

Also, ROI can be very hard to measure. Some PPC engines (Adwords and Overture, specifically) provide conversion measurement tools, so that you can track whether your pay-per-click campaigns are generating the desired result. But these tracking tools aren't 100% accurate, and at the time of this writing the smaller PPC providers don't deliver any conversion tracking.

And watch out for junk traffic. Most pay-per-click services distribute a segment of their results to several search engines. While you certainly want your listing displayed on Yahoo, AOLSearch and MSN, you may not want your listings showing up and generating clicks from some of the deeper, darker corners of the Internet. The resulting traffic may look good in statistics reports but is very unlikely to generate a return.

Finally, pay-per-click advertising does not scale. If you get more traffic, you pay more money in direct proportion to that traffic - your cost per click stays constant, and your overall cost increases. Compare that to natural search engine optimization, where you invest a fixed amount of time and/or money to achieve a better rank, and your cost per click goes down as you draw more traffic.

Why PPC is Good

Pay-per-click advertising can generate traffic right away. It's simple: If you spend enough, you can get top placement, and potential customers will see you first. If folks are searching for the keyphrases on which you bid and you've placed a well-written ad, you will get clicks the moment the ad is activated.

So PPC advertising is fast: With some systems, such as Google Adwords, you can generate targeted traffic within a few minutes of opening an account.

PPC advertising is also nimble: Where natural search engine marketing or other forms of advertising can lag weeks or months behind changing audience behavior, you can adjust most pay-per-click campaigns in hours or days. That provides unmatched ability to adjust to market conditions.

PPC can also be a bargain: Sometimes, you can find keyword 'niches' for which the top bid is around $.10 - in that case, PPC is a great option, because you can generate traffic to your site for a fraction of the cost of any other form of paid advertising.

So, balancing the good and the bad, where does PPC fit in? As a focused advertising tool.

The Role of PPC Advertising

Most businesses can't afford to solely rely on PPC advertising. It's too expensive, and bid amounts inevitably climb. But pay-per-click can fill a few important roles:

• Campaign- and issue-based traffic: If you have a short-term campaign for a new product, service or special issue, pay-per-click can be a great way to generate buzz. You can start a pay-per-click campaign within, at most, 24-48 hours, and you can generally change the text of your ad in mid-campaign, so adjusting your message is easy. If you need to focus attention for a finite amount of time, PPC is perfect.

• Direct-response business: If you sell a product or offer a service that folks can purchase the moment they arrive at your web site, pay-per-click is a great tool. Online stores are a great example: You know that each click generated is a real potential customer, so spending money to increase the number of clicks makes sense.

• Niche terms: If you are trying to generate traffic for a highly specific keyphrase, PPC can often provide bargains. For example, you might not want to pay the top bid for 'bicycles', but 'Landshark Bicycles' is probably a lot less expensive ($.10 per click as of this writing, actually).

The overall rule of thumb? Focus, focus, focus. Natural search engine optimization is a PR-based, long-term attempt to grow your brand and image. Pay-per-click advertising, however, should be handled like any other form of paid advertising: Gingerly, and with a clear, quantifiable short- or medium-term goal in mind. In other words, concentrate on conversions, not clicks.

 

by Cathy Stucker, IdeaLady.com
Copyright 2003, Cathy Stucker 

Do you think you don't have enough time to market? Here's a solution that can help you get started on marketing, or any other task you've been putting off.

Promise yourself you will spend 15 uninterrupted minutes working on one aspect of marketing. Edit the copy for your brochure. Update your email signature file. Make some phone calls. Revise a web page. Send a letter. Post a message to an email list. Or identify a media outlet and send your most recent press release to them.

You'll be amazed by what you can accomplish in just 15 minutes. Think you can't get anything done in that short time? How long does it take to clean your house? How long does it take if your mother-in-law will be there in 15 minutes? I rest my case! 

Set a timer (so you don't watch the clock) and focus on your task for 15 minutes. Don't answer the phone or get distracted by anything else. When the timer goes off, you can stop. Of course, if you are on a roll, you might want to keep going for a little longer, but don't keep at it for so long that you lose focus.

There is nothing magic about 15 minutes. Make it 20 or 30 minutes, if you wish. Just commit to spending that time intently working on the task at hand. 

By the way, this technique can work for anything else you've been putting off. Tackle filing for 15 minutes a day and watch the stacks of paper shrink.

Schedule your 15 minutes every day and see how that 15  minutes affects your results!

As the Idea Lady, Cathy Stucker can help you attract customers and make yourself famous. Get a free tip every Tuesday when you subscribe to Bright Ideas at www.IdeaLady.com .