Are You Building Traffic and Assets?

August 7, 2009 · Filed Under Get Traffic

Are You Building Traffic and Assets

For the past 6 to 8 weeks, I have had several requests from business owners to submit a proposal to increase the traffic and page rank to their web sites. When confronted with the question “What is it you hope to accomplish?” or “What is the specific goal you want to attain?” the usual response has been something between stuttering and silence. The inherent implication of increasing traffic and page rank is they want to get more customers.

Okay, let’s run with that. How many new customers do you want? What is your conversion rate for visitors now? I was surprised at how many of these sharp marketers couldn’t answer either question. If you have a 2% conversion rate and you want 1000 new customers you will need at least 50,000 visitors. There are of course many additional questions that need answers, but let’s just focus on these for now.

Garden

A few of the potential clients became agitated when ask these questions and came back at me with “I just want more traffic and better page rank.” I suggest you start a blog that makes fun of celebrities. You’ll get traffic and the page rank will come if the content is controversial. Maybe add a video where you are screaming and crying “leave Brittany alone”. That seems to work.

Traffic broker versus asset builder

Traffic brokers just send traffic from one site to another site. When you do this, you’re very vulnerable. If an affiliate program you’re promoting through PPC bites the dust, you have to start a whole new campaign from scratch.

If you’ve built a site (or a network of sites) with good content, you have no problem if the affiliate program you’re promoting dies. You can just switch to a different product. That’s the difference: You’re building assets. You’ve built yourself a big spider web with your own website in the middle of it, surrounded by a bunch of other websites, and you’ve built that web yourself.

And, now more questions from interested readers and followers.

Is there any benefit to creating blogs?

From my experience and testing, blogs don’t seem to help my rankings that much. However, I do think blogs help a site get noticed by search engines, but mostly by people that may never have stumbled onto the site if they hadn’t read about it on a blog.

Remember that a blog is just a website. If the content of the blog is not very good then you’re not going to have great results. If you pit a static HTML page with great content against a blog with average content, the HTML page will win every time. The real benefit with blogs is that they’re so easy to use, but other than that, I don’t think there’s as much of a benefit as everyone says.

Does keyword density and other on page factors make much difference to your search engine rankings?

It depends on the search engine. Different search engines have different levels of susceptibility to on page factors. Bing is particularly susceptible (this may rapidly change has it matures), Yahoo slightly less, and Google even less than that. I think the best you can hope for is a 20% affect on page rank.

What I recommend is that instead of focusing on keywords density, you focus on the title of your page. Once you have your title, write content about that title, and it’ll all seem natural.

When I have over-optimized pages crammed with keywords, I find that I get quick rankings, but they fall off very quickly. Somehow, the well-written content does better, although I don’t know how they figure it out! Focus on your reader and on your incoming links rather than keyword density.

That said, I still believe in the H1 tag and the bolded keyword, but I’m not about to run around saying, “Ooh, I need 6% keywords!” I mean, you still need to make sure that the search engines know what your content is about. You should still have your keywords in your title and your description, but other than that… content is just content.

Does having your keywords in your domain name make a difference for your search engine rankings?

Here’s a funny story. When Affiliate Elite was released a friend of mine had the domain name “affiliate-elite-review.info”. The site had nothing on it but a blank WordPress template, but even so, it managed to rank #7. Of course once people started promoting Affiliate Elite properly, he was bumped off, but it shows that your domain name has some influence.

Do you have an opinion on link-building tools like Linkvana?

That’s a great question. No, I don’t. They may be great and since I have not used them I can’t honestly answer. That being said, there are many ways out there for building links that come at no cost. I think that people spend too much time on these systems, when what you really need is a variety of links. I don’t think you should make it your focus. If a site wants to swap links with me, I say “Give me content and I’ll give you content.” A link in content is much more powerful than a link in a directory. And, for goodness sake, don’t put a script on your page that says “Powered by ABC”. These are reciprocal links and Google absolutely hates them.

Can you recommend a script for managing reciprocal links?

Not really. I just insert links using plain old HTML, and I don’t really pay attention to whether people keep their links back to me. I check the links once a year and remove the ones that no longer exist. Be careful that you don’t put more than 20 links on a page. Google hates it, and any more than 20 links is useless.

Are press releases effective?

I posted about press releases awhile back, “Press Releases – Are They Still Relevant?” , where I ask readers to respond to some questions. I think a professionally crafted press release is good when you create a site that focuses on promoting a product — the good thing about a press release is that you get to include keyword backlinks, and it ends up being spread everywhere and that is powerful exposure. The downside is that it costs a minimum of $100 for me to write you press release, and often around $200 depending on how much research is needed. I would say that if your site is profitable give it a go. But, it’s by no means essential.

Do you purchase links from Yahoo directory?

Two years ago I would have said “sure”, but again, these days there are much better ways of getting links with this Web 2.0 strategy. If your site is profitable, once again, you might give it a go, but I never do it up front anymore.

Can you share any new ways to get backlinks?

RSS aggregators: There are a lot of these online that people don’t use. Feedbite and Google Notepad, for example. What you can do with these is take all your RSS feeds and submit them, and the aggregator spits out one big RSS feed. You’re not submitting content, but it makes content for you.
Social bookmarking: Make sure you have good content.
Ping.in: Every time I submit something to Hubpages I take the RSS feed from there and ping it at ping.in. I’ll also go to Twitter and say “I’ve just put up a new page on Hubpages, here’s the link.” You don’t need to add extra content, just put a link in there and you’ll earn yourself a backlink. I’ll do the same thing with Twitter every time I create a new lens in Squidoo, then I’ll go to Ping.in and ping both the Squidoo lens and the RSS feed that Twitter makes.
Another thing you can do is anytime someone links to you, Twitter about it. That sends Google to the link immediately so that it knows you have another backlink to your site. By promoting other people’s sites, you’re also promoting your own.

You can read a little more detail about this in my post Backlinks and Web 2.0

Mostly it’s just about seeing what’s out there and finding a way to use it. If you have found other successful backlink strategies, let me know if you want to guest post it here.

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