Strategic Website Traffic

For what appears to be years now there’s been an ongoing debate among internet marketers and folks that do search engine optimization about what is more important to developing good traffic flow for a website- good content or a linking strategy.

While I believe that with some decent on-site optimization you can get some search engine traffic with just content for some really long tail search phrases I won’t lie to you and tell you that you’ll be receiving a typhoon of traffic just by writing some stellar content on your blog or website.

It’s like the ld ananlogy about the tree falling in the middle of the woods. If nobody is around when it falls does it make a sound?

The same can be said for your site. If you write stellar content but nobody reads it how well anybody else find out about it?

We have to be honest with ourselves online when promoting a website… sure we’d all like to think that  just by merely posting  to our Blogs that the entire world should come flocking to see what we have to say but I think most of us know by now that just the opposite is true.

If you want the traffic, you’re going to have to go out and get it and that means spending a fair amount of time marketing and promoting your website or Blog .

Good content and a solid linking strategy are king if you want to have a successful website.

You focus on building good links to your site to move your site up the search engine results and you write good content to keep visitors coming back and to keep them on your site to do what you have to do.

Building and acquiring links to your site is time consuming, boring and sometimes seemingly futile but once you start to receive steady, targeted traffic from a search engine like Google you’ll see that search engine traffic is the most targeted traffic on the internet today.

So what can you do to start building and acquiring links to your site?

Start off with the basics and see where that leaves you in the search engine results. I usually populate a site with at least 5-10 articles before I begin to promote and build links to it. Once that is done I start bulding links by:

• Writing articles and distributing them to directories
• Submitting the site to online directories
• Commenting on “Do Follow” Blogs
• Submitting the site to bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and Delicious
• Creating sites on free hosting platforms like Blogger, Squidoo and Wordpress and linking to the main site
• Create a Blog and submit the feed and Blog to RSS and Blog directories
• Create a sig for the site and post on “Do Follow” forums

That should give you a good start. If you were smart you would do some research and see how many incoming links your competitors have so you can see approximatel how links you’ll have to build to usurp them in the rankings. That’s how I do it anyhow.

This linking strategy will get you to the top of the search engine rankings for most long tail keyword phrases but there will be some instances, usually in competitive niches, where it won’t. Some other factors, outside of the number of incoming links,  will weigh in on how a website ranks in the search engines and I’ll talk about that in the next post.

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When you’re looking to increase website traffic it’s important to recognize that not all website traffic is created equally. There are a lot of alleged internet marketing gurus out there proclaiming all the benefits of social traffic, web 2.0 traffic and what they’re failing to recognize and tell you is that this kind of traffic typically isn’t targeted.

I’m sure you’ve heard of most of these popular social sites, bookmarking sites and web 2.0 sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, delicious and you get the point. Guys just because there are a ton of people hanging out at these websites it doesn’t mean they’re looking to be sold on your products and more often then not these people will be offended upon seeing your sales message.

When you increase website traffic you want to make sure you’re spending a good amount of your time focusing on targeted traffic. If you ask me the most targeted traffic on the web is traffic that comes to your website via the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The reason I’m not too hot on social traffic is because social traffic can basically be defined as casual surfing on the web. Typically when people are on MySpace or FaceBook, they’re not there to be sold something. They’re there to socialize with their friends and peers and occasionally they go off surfing on completely unrelated tangents.

The main point of this post being that this type of traffic, social traffic, does not convert well. You’re better off going after search engine traffic for people typing in searches for keywords related to your website or whatever it is you’re selling. A lot of the bigger companies that have been aggressively advertising on the web recently are now discovering that it’s hard to convert and monetize traffic on sites like MySpace and Facebook and as a result they’re focusing more and more on search traffic.

In order to increase website traffic, you want to do much more then just blindly trying to bring visitors to your website by any means possible. It’s equally important to focus on the quality of the traffic you bring to your website. believe me your conversion rates will thank you for it!

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Another great way to increase website traffic and acquire more In Links or back links to your Blog or website is to social bookmark your individual Blog posts.

Before you go around and go blindly bookmarking all of your posts and getting yourself banned from some of the most authoritative sites on the internet I suggest you read this post: Increase Website Traffic Using Social News Sites.

That’s a quick post that’ll give you a primer on how to go about social bookmarking some of your posts for some deep link juice that’s sure to help move your Blog or website up the search engine rankings. A few more things about social bookmarking your individual posts for deep link juice…

Make sure you submit or bookmark plenty of other sites (not owned by you) to the social bookmarking sites to avoid being banned or being labeled a “marketer” or worse a spammer.

Avoid over-doing it… I usually make about 3 runs through each social book marking site for each Blog or website.

Bookmark some of your own “parasite” sites like your Squidoo Lenses, Blogger Blogs and Wordpress Blogs and link them up to your main sites. The more search engine spiders crawl your sites the better…

And finally probably the best piece of advice I can give you when social bookmarking your individual Blog posts to Increase Website Traffic is to immerse yourself in some of the more popular bookmarking and news sites and discover and learn what types of articles get the most mileage at each individual site. Once you learn what types of articles draw the most attention you can tailor your submitted stories to each individual site.

Why would you spend so much time on something like this?

Because some of the more popular social bookmarking sites can deliver more traffic then your server can ever hope to handle!

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The easiest way to get on the first page of Google and increase your website traffic for free is to build an entire website or Blog around a long tail keyword phrase. In the internet marketing world this practice is referred to as keyword sniping.
What is a long tail keyword phrase?

A long tail keyword phrase is generally 3-5 words in length and a combination of words that someone would type into a search engine to find your product or service. Internet marketers target these keyword phrases because most webmasters don’t and its easy for us to rise to the top of the search engine rankings.

So let’s say I were looking for a laptop computer, I might type something like Sony Vaio Laptop into the Google search engine… now the reason long tail keywords work is twofold:

1. Most people with websites or blogs haven’t a clue what they’re doing when it comes to search engine optimization so they don’t do anything to optimize their sites for the search engines
2. Most websites and Blogs that are optimized are optimized around really competitive, single-word keywords like “computer” or “laptop” instead of something much more specific like “Sony Vaio Laptop”

Using long tail keyword phrases will not only give you a better chance of obtaining some free search engine traffic but the search engines will also deliver more targeted traffic.

You have no clue what someone who types “computer” into Google is looking for but you have a pretty good idea that someone who types in “Sony Vaio Laptop” is looking for information on or is looking to buy a Sony Vaio Laptop, right?

So it just makes more sense to target your website or Blog around a long tail keyword phrase because the traffic you’ll be receiving is much more targeted and it’s easier traffic to obtain!

Once you start ranking in the top 20 results of Google for your long tail keyword phrases you can then start to target more competitive keywords but it’s always a good idea to target less competitive keywords at the outset so you can start building some keyword authority for your website.

In the next post I’ll talk about how to target long tail keywords to increase website traffic.

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If I had to define search engine optimization in three words or less those three words would be anchored back links.

Anchored back links are the key, the lifeblood to your Blogs and websites ranking highly in the search engines so it’s goes without saying that you need them and you need a lot of them!

Generating anchored back links is so important to your Blogs search engine rankings that you should spend 75% OF YOUR TIME CREATING THEM.

Too many Bloggers and internet marketers spend too much time writing and creating beautiful and elaborate websites and Blogs and nobody ever sees them because they never take the time to search engine optimize their sites to climb the search engine rankings.

Don’t let that happen to you!

Here’s how you create an anchored back link in html:

<a href=”http://strategicwebsiteprofits.com“> Make Money Online</a> - and heres what it looks like: Make Money Online

The part in red is the url where the link points to and will ultimately direct traffic to when someone clicks on the link.

The part in blue is what is referred to as your anchor text and this is the part that a reader will actually see online. With anchored text it’s important to use the keywords that you have chosen to optimize your site around. Every time you get and anchored link back to your site for a particular keyword, you build your sites authority for that keyword and google basically ses links as “votes” for your website so they gradually move you up the search engine rankings.

Until google figures out a better way to rank websites in their algorhyhm, Anchored Back Links are and will remain the key to ranking highly in the search engines.

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The title tag is the first thing on your web page that tells the search engines what your page is about. Your title tag should tell the search engines what your page is about and then everything else on the page should reinforce what your title tag initially told the search engine spider.

If you’re Wordpress Blogging like you should be and you’re using the All-In-One SEO Plugin then you can set the home title tag description by clicking on the “setting” tab in your Wordpress dashboard… even more important though is that All-In-One also allows you to set your title tag for each individual post.

For SEO purposes you want to include your targeted keywords in your title tag, in your Permalinks and somewhere in your post as well (pereferably once in the first paragraph and once in the last - and BOLD it (your keyword) for extra emphasis.

Basically you want to make it so that the search engine spiders know exactly what all of your posts are about so you can generate targeted search engine traffic and you can do this by using title tags the way I mentioned above.

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Generate Website Traffic With Search Engine Optimization Part 1

This is the first post of a series of posts I plan on doing designed to help you get better search engine rankings and help you generate more website traffic through search engine optimization.

Most of the websites I develop are Wordpress Blogs so this entire series is going to be based around how you can optimize a Wordpress blog for the search engine rankings.

Frankly if you’re not using a Wordpress Blog you’re just missing out because the search engines, particularly Google, love Wordpress Blogs and the Wordpress Blogs themselves are easy to set up (just takes the click of one button), they’re easy to optimize for the search engines and new plugins (widgets that extend the functionality of Wordpress) are always being released that allow to do even more with your Blogs.

Enough about Wordpress… let’s talk about Meta Description Tags…

Read more…

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Unless you have a huge marketing and advertising budget, you’re probably wasting your money trying to brand yourself online.

I know you hear, or read, a lot of supposed internet marketing experts talking about branding and pontificating post after post about how important it is to “brand” yourself online but let me tell you what is even more important…

Direct Response Internet Marketing

All the advertising and marketing you do online should initiate some type of response, ok. Don’t spend your hard-earned money just putting your name out there. Put your name out there and coerce some type of response from your reader.

Every advertisement, article, post, etc. you write should have some type of offer and give the reader a reason to go to your website right now.

Don’t beat around the bush.

Write the promotional piece and then write another one and then split test the two against each other.

Branding is something that should occur only as a byproduct of your direct-response advertising.

Blogging in large part is a practice in branding in that all you’re trying to do is get the word out about yourself or your business or maybe your product… you can mix in some direct response internet marketing by including a blurb at the end of every post asking your readers to sign up for your RSS feed or your email newsletter.

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In order to obtain any organic website traffic from any online search engine the first thing you’ll want to do is determine which keywords you’ll want to optimize your website for.

During this first step you’ll want to brainstorm pretty much any terms, words and phrases that people may use to find your website.

As a very basic example if you had a website where you were selling weight loss pills you would probably want to optimize your website for words like weight-loss, lose weight and weight loss supplement right?

Wrong.

Read more…

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Using the default Wordpress Blog permalink structure will cost you traffic!

The default wordpress permalink structure looks like this:

http://strategicwebsitetraffic.com/?p=123

You want it to look like this:

http://strategicwebsitetraffic.com/are-your-wrodpress-blogs-set-up-properly/

To do that you’ll want to log into your wordpress dashboard. Once there you’ll want to click on options and then on permalinks. Here’s what I recommend:

I recommend you choose the custom permalink structure and enter the following:

/%postname%/

Hit the “update permalink structure” button at the bottom and you’re all set.

Whenever I create a new Blog this is always one of the first things I do as this one simple change will make your URL’s more search engine friendly and that will result in more traffic.

Quite the reward for 20 seconds of work… if you can call updating your permalink structure “work”…

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