Getting the Right Kind of Traffic to your Site
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If you have a website from which you wish to profit, you want it to be as attractive to the major search engines as possible. The more relevant your site looks to a search engine, the higher your ranking, and the more traffic will get to your site.
While traffic numbers are important, they aren’t the whole story. If that were the case everyone would put porn on their site to maximize the traffic. No, to rank well with search engines and float up to the top of their rankings, you not only have to have quantity traffic, but also quality traffic. That means the kind of traffic that’s likely to stick around and buy something. Optimizing your website means finding those visitors and getting them to visit and come back.
There are numerous things you can do, but perhaps the most important is to have good content on your site. Search engines know when you’re just stuffing your site with keywords, and they’ll think you’re spam. But the bigger reason is that if you did stuff your content with keywords and did successfully rise to the top of the search engine rankings, it wouldn’t really matter, because people don’t like spammy sites and don’t want to buy things from them.
You can do things directly on your site and off your site to maximize your SEO pull. Major search engines don’t just look at your site, they also look to see what other sites link to your site. The search engines’ logic is if a bunch of other sites are linking to your site, then your site must be pretty relevant. This is especially true when a high ranking site links to you. But you don’t have to just sit back and wait for those links to materialize. You can encourage them in numerous ways: by using social bookmarking sites like Digg, by commenting on blogs, doing a “guest spot” writing for another blog (and including links to your site in the post), and using article marketing, which is submitting articles to article directories and making sure the articles have links back to your site.
There are all kinds of tags associated with your site’s content. There are meta tags, title tags, keyword tags, and image tags. Put relevant words in every tag field you can, particularly the meta tag description. That’s what people see in the search engine results pages, so you want people to like it enough to visit your site instead of those others that show up on the search engine results page. A good meta tag description is like being the best dressed person at the club and getting all the attention.
If you want to make money from your website, you not only have to get people to visit there, you have to get them to buy stuff. The number of visitors who buy divided by the total number of visitors is your conversion rate. You want it to be as high as possible. So you want to attract visitors that are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. Getting a decent conversion rate is the holy grail of the online business world. While there are any number of short term things you can do to build traffic, you also need to look at traffic building as a long term strategy too. You have to keep the content interesting, and you have to have a well-designed site that’s easy to navigate. Websites shouldn’t be static entities that don’t change once you get a good conversion rate. Internet users are fickle. You have to keep them interested.
These techniques work whether your site is selling an actual product, whether it does affiliate marketing, or whether it uses context ads. Getting traffic is important, but the type of traffic you get is also important. The best SEO strategies get you the visitors who are most likely to buy what you sell.