Web Site Traffic

[Editor's note: Web site traffic. Whether you are a niche marketer, or a brick and mortar business manager, you need more traffic.This is the one topic that every one of my clients, and many of my readers, ask about on an on-going basis. Everyone wants to know how to get more traffic to their site or blog. So, in response to this demand, I'm going to devote the next several articles to the topic of increasing your web site traffic. Today's guest article focuses on some tried and true methods for increasing the traffic to your site.

In future articles, I'll explore the different types of traffic - and which type you should be most interested in. In the mean time, enjoy today's article. Send me your traffic questions, by leaving a comment below, and I'll do my best to answer them for you. ~Scott]

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Traffic is unquestionably important in the success of an online marketing business. However, it is important to understand why quality website traffic is critical to the success of your site. That’s what we are going to help you with in this article.

Are the visitors there because they are interested in your niche or your product and the content on your site or are they there because they have been paid to click on an ad? Those in the former group are there because of their interest. They are targeted or pre-qualified leads. The latter group is untargeted and unlikely to stay on your site very long or to ever return.

Once you understand the difference it will be much easier for you to strive for targeted traffic. Let’s take a look at some of the ways the experts do this.

You are no doubt familiar with the phrase “content is king” and that certainly applies to your website or blog. It is greatly important that the content you put on your website is interesting to your visitors. It should also be informative. It can be educational; it may answer a question or even solve a problem.

The information you post should be updated frequently. This will keep your visitors interested and increase the chances they will return often.

Now let’s examine some ways to drive even more traffic to your site.

Write Articles. Writing articles pertaining to your niche is a good long term strategy for sending traffic to your website. This is especially true if you submit them to 4 or 5 top article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles ArticleDashboard, Buzzle, and ArticleBase.

Your articles need to be 400 – 500 words long with an author’s resource box at the end which directs visitors to your site. For article marketing to be successful you should submit articles on a regular basis.

Use Social Marketing. Facebook and Twitter, as you no doubt know, are very popular all over the world and more and more internet marketers are making use of these sites to market their business. These sites offer exceptional opportunities to advertise your site for free.

Participate In Forums. Forums can be of great help to you in 2 ways. First, you can learn from others in your niche what has been successful for them in their internet marketing endeavors. Second, you can offer your own advice or assistance to others which will increase your credibility and the trust of others. This can be big boost in your traffic.

Do Your Keyword Research. I could have placed this at the top of the list because it is so important. However, here near the end is a good place to emphasize how important it is to use the right keywords to improve your website traffic.

There are numerous sites and tools available to help you with keyword research and many of them are free such as Google Keywords AdWords Tool.

Using keyword phrases related to your topic will help people find your website. You need to develop a list of these phrases that you have determined to have a high number of searches and low competition and the use a different one in in each of your article and posts to your site.

These are all ways to get quality website traffic – traffic that is targeted and pre-qualified to improve your sales.

Walt Gemmell is the owner of earn at home a website where you can get your own income generating website ready to take orders. Also visit free traffic to discover 25 ways to get free traffic.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Walt_Gemmell

http://EzineArticles.com/?How-To-Get-Quality-Website-Traffic-Like-The-Experts&id=6694974

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[Editor's note: Today's guest article takes a hard look at "search engine results pages" {SERP's), and focuses on the difference between sponsored and organic listings; the former being the core of PPC strategists, and the latter being the realm of SEO masters. Students of niche marketing will do well to understand the uses of each when developing an overall marketing strategy for their businesses. ~Scott]

A quick look at Google (or any one of the other search engines), will show you that the average search engine results page (SERP), has several distinct elements. With Google, these will include:

* Pay-per-click (PPC) or ‘sponsored’ results.
Typically, these are on the far right of the page, arranged vertically. For some search phrases, there will also be PPC results at the top of the page, above the organic results.

* Products, Local and others
Below these paid for (PPC) results in the main area of the results, will be the different kinds of results. These will depend a lot on the particular topic or term you searched for. These results may include local business results, news headlines, social networking results (such as Twitter), and videos from YouTube.

* Organic results
Below these results, is where all the natural search results can be found. In all three of the top search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo), the organic results do take up more of the page. Interestingly, the less searched for the keywords or search terms, the fewer sponsored links you will find, and the greater the area occupied by the organic results.

Most searched for keywords on the other hand, are handled differently. SERPs for these are often mixed, with a high volume of PPC and organic results. Standing out through all the clutter for such terms is very challenging. An easy short-cut though, is through targeting keywords that are less popular, but that are still relevant.

On the other end of the scale, are niche (and often technical) keywords. For most of these keywords, there are no PPC ads at all, and so all of the results found on the SERP are organic. Doing search engine optimization on your site and your landing pages for such keywords therefore, will result in the greatest conversion rates, because the competition is lower. The majority of the larger organizations and companies online will tend to optimize their websites for the broadest and most popular search terms imaginable, irrespective of the conversion rates they are achieving. With their almost unlimited budgets, they can often afford that type of shotgun approach to marketing.

On a more positive note though, the vast majority of internet users do trust organic search results. Industry bodies and analysts have done lots of research that all come to the same conclusion. Over 60% of internet users click on natural search results more than ads. Power users, and more experienced internet users actually click on the organic results even more often. Pretty much the only industry where this is not the case, is the insurance sector, where the majority of their visitors comes from paid for advertising.

Clearly, using only PPC similar search engine marketing campaigns, means you are not getting the best results from your website advertising efforts. Alongside increasing traffic, you can increase trust for your site and brand through search engine optimization efforts to better your organic search results and ranking. Any up and coming site owner, especially those whose customers are experienced internet users, would therefore do well to invest a fair bit of effort into search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is really not rocket science. Everyone can do it. You can decide the amount of technical detail you wish to get into when you embark on it, but you should not ignore it.

Article Source: http://www.articlesnatch.com

About the Author:
James Winsoar is a Budget SEO Consultant in the UK specialising in both on-page and off-page search engine optimisation. He can help to improve your visibility online. Visit his website at http://www.jw-enterprises.co.uk/ or call the SEO hotline on 0115 9400 899.

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Technorati Tags: niche marketing, Search engine marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search engine results page, SERP

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By Scott Spooner

The goal of niche marketing, and niche marketers, is to identify a niche with both plenty of search traffic and an acceptable level of competition. There are plenty of tools available – both paid and free – to help you uncover these niches. But, what do you do after you have discovered your own perfect niche?

This is where “rank building” strategies come into play; the goal of which is to rank your site, blog, or post, high enough in the search engine rankings so that you will be found. These strategies range from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Pay-Per-Click (PPC), and everything in between.

PPC gets you on top of the search engines quickly, but you have to have a considerable ad budget to keep you there. SEO won’t cost you anything but time (unless you outsource the activities), but it could potentially take you a long time to obtain a high ranking (for a competitive keyword), and longer still to maintain that position.

Following is a summary of how I am able to take competitive keywords, focus them on a blog, and achieve #1 ranking positions in Google. I’ll assume that you don’t have an advertising budget, are willing to learn a little about SEO, and can afford to spend some time to develop your rankings. I’ll also assume that you have a blog, or similar platform with which you can post your content.

The Five Steps

1. Keyword Research – This is a very important step; and one that many fail to do correctly. Once you’ve picked your niche (or potential niche), grab your favorite keyword tool (depending on my needs, I use Market Samurai, Micro Niche Finder, or Google’s free keyword tool), and do some keyword research. Look for keywords that are getting at least 80 searches per day (2400 per month), with no more than 30,000 competing web sites. Once you find 4 or 5 of these keywords, build your blog around them. The trick here is to narrow your focus; I try and develop niches that are “narrow, but deep”. You are trying to get a foothold in the search engines, and not “be all things to all people”.
2. Content Creation – With your keywords in hand, it is time to start creating, or gathering, your content. Remember to focus on the keywords that you found in step #1 above. If you are having trouble coming up with your own content, consider searching the content of video sites (e.g. YouTube), article sites (e.g. EZine Articles), and other blogs in your niche. Whether you create the content yourself, or repurpose it from other sources, make sure that it is focused on your keywords. Again, narrow, but deep.
3. Blog Posting – As you gather content, you’ll want to post that content on your blog. The secret here is to post consistently and on a regular basis. Give your readers a schedule to look forward to and, at the same time, give the search engine spiders something new to crawl each time they stop by. Obviously, the more you post, the quicker your site will develop, and the faster your rankings will occur. But don’t get hung up on it: whether you post once a day, or once a week, pick a schedule that you can maintain. Finally, make sure you are using your keywords in your posting tags. This will help the search engine spiders better understand what you are posting.
4. Social Book Marking – After every post, bookmark your post throughout the social media sphere. I will typically bookmark my posts on Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. I’ll also create links on my Facebook and Twitter accounts. This step is very important because each of these bookmarks creates a back link pointing back to your blog. SEO experts will tell you that the number one “off page factor” in improving your rankings is the quantity and quality of your back links. Social book marking sites offer these quality links for you. Pick the social media sites that you like and start book marking. One last note here: use your keywords as your “anchor text” (the text that you see) when creating your back links.
5. Rank Tracking – Install an analytics package on your site (I use Google Analytics, which is free). Keep track of the traffic arriving at your site and monitor: 1) where that traffic is coming from; 2) how they find you, and; 3) what keywords they are using to search for your topics. You can not fix what you haven’t been measuring. So, measure how well your keywords are performing and use those measurements as a guide for improving your long term ranking.

The above will take some time – and that is O.K. The search engines give a certain amount of credibility to sites that have been around for some time. This all works to your advantage. Just focus on your keywords (remember: narrow, but deep), and think about creating, or gathering, content.

In summary, you don’t need expensive tools or programs; in fact, you can complete each of the above steps using free tools available on the web. What you do need is to be prolific, persistent, and patient. Remember always that Internet marketing is a process, not an event.

The only question that remains is: when will you begin that process?

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By Scott Spooner

The other day I was having lunch with one of my clients when he mentioned that he had just received an email from a large “Internet marketing company” that was pitching “local search”. The email claimed that my client would be able to secure Page 1 rankings, for any keyword, in the major search engines, by simply adding the name of the local community to the keyword phrase.

My client asked me what  I thought about this. I told him that I thought it was a waste of his money. Let me explain.

I have worked with many clients to set-up and optimize their local search programs. Local search is a valuable service, but only if you have a physical, brick-and-mortar, type of business. This particular client has an on-line presence only; there is no physical location. As such, they are looking for customers without reference to any particular locale.

Since their customers can arrive from any point on the Internet, and since they will never stop by any storefront, it doesn’t matter if the “store” is located in California or Kalamazoo.

For that reason, and for this particular client, local search won’t really buy them any more traffic because the frame of reference of the customer is on the product, not the location.

So, if you are considering setting up a local search program (or having someone do it for you), take a moment to decide whether or not local search will bring you any benefits. If you sell exclusively on-line, you can skip local search (and mobile marketing as well, but that’s another topic). If you have a physical location, and can benefit from walk-in traffic, then local search isn’t only desirable for your business, it is becoming mandatory.

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So much is being written these days about building web traffic to your site. A quick search on Google for the key phrase “building web traffic”, results in over 45MM pages  alone.

Once you cut through all of the clutter, however, you will find that building traffic comes down to the following four concepts:

1. You must carefully identify which keywords your prospects are using when they search.

2. You must learn the basics of SEO – both on-page and off-page – to begin the ranking process.

3. You must focus on providing quality content on an ongoing basis.

4. You must seek out, and obtain, quality back-links from relevant web sites within your niche.

There are many strategies, both paid and free, for implementing the above four steps, but these are the four steps you’ll have to master if you want to see your traffic numbers increase.

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