The Naked Truth About Website Traffic

A great way to generate quick, quality traffic is using articles (see goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com and get an account).

Another really cool way to generate traffic that will allow journalists and others (including search engines!) to get to your site is prweb.com,marketwire.com, etc.

The killer strategy that can add really good exposure and quality for your website is a service called Expert Click. It’s 895.00 for the year, and you might want to do some research before signing up.

The site is located here. 

A common challenge is:

a) try to understand what SEO means in the first place

b) try to figure out when to introduce SEO engineers into the web development cycle

Answers: Read the enclosed references, and for b) answer is: early & upfront. You don’t want to be caught with your pants down and your budget exhausted when introducing your site to the SEO technician - you will often need to go back to the drawing board. (I see it all the time).

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3627555

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/21732

How to blog your way into riches.

Download the free money making guide here: free pdf download: “how to make $10,000 a month”

This is real data about how to make money online using blog techniques, but they can apply to web sites as well. Many of the techniques can work for you too - if you apply them correctly, which is also shown.

Google reached over $700.00 a share today, and with a 57% increase in revenue from this time last year, they now have reached a company at 4.23 billion dollars. (I say this with my pinky nail at the right side of my mouth, Austin Powers-style).

It topped Wall Street expecations, and you can read more about it here: Google swells above expectations.

I was speaking with a client in real estate today.

They didn’t know that you could use widgets to generate potentially large traffic to their site. The example I gave was the “mortgage calculator” example. If branded correctly, and created with a new, fresh, weird, funny, useful twist - visitors may use it (first) and find it great enough to email to somebody (second), who in turn send it to their friends/network (hey, did I hear ‘viral’?).

If set up correctly, with backlinks and not too “pitchy”, it can be a very worthwhile exercise. While many say formulas exist for viral marketing using widgets and gadgets, I say it’s all about “strategy” and “testing”. Google is a master at creating gadgets, and many other companies are creating Mash-ups to intermix technology, widgets and gadgets for useful applications.  Check out Ning.com as a platform to build your own

As Jeff Huber, VP of Engineering, at Google in a presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit (Oct 2007, San Francisco, CA) explains, “Gadgets are being created using rss, html, flash, and css and that gadgets are open, easy, mashable, packable, portable, and embeddable”. And, “what rss did for content, gadgets are doing for apps”.

Therefore, understanding Mashups and use of widgets and gadgets in online marketing programs are a valuable exercise, and can be fun too. Get your creative brains together, and think up how you can do this.

For the realty company, I suggested a Calculator that captures the origins of the user on the web, and use a Google Map to highlight top listings in the visitors geographical area, to show the power of the realtor’s services. They loved it! (Now, who will do the work?)

Reference: http://www.webguild.org/2007/10/gadgetizing-of-web.html

Unexpected results and a huge win for clicks from this guy (an example of how viral marketing takes hold, without planning or knowing how to do it):

Google Designs Their Own Interface

As you are ramping up your website…

…building links, adding content and developing hot looking designs, that appeal both to users (important) and you (not as important) - there is one thing that is missed by over 97% of all search engine optimization wanna-bees.

Content is King as we know - and the position of keywords in TITLE, H<x> and BODY elements along with proximity (how far related words and phrases are apart) and keyword density (less important) - there is a single factor much more important.

One key factor is the most important
In order to save the most time, money and energy - spend time on this - and you’ll be successful: targeting the right keywords in your inbound links. If you are targeting “buy red shoes”, make sure to get that link from a relevant site (even within your site) - and apply that text in the anchor text (blue underlined text) from the page.

In order to capture that keyword or those phrases, use a keyword research tools like Wordtracker (aff) or the Overture Suggestion Tool.

The time you spend here will pay off in large dividends, if done right.

“More than 750 million people age 15 and older – or 95 percent of the worldwide Internet audience – conducted 61 billion searches worldwide in August, an average of more than 80 searches per searcher.

Google Sites ranked as the top worldwide search property in August with 37.1 billion searches conducted.

Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 8.5 billion searches, while Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches.”

Read the comScore data sheet

(and think about the growing trend in China - and read “international SEO” and “threads on China SEO”

Many websites are created from incredible designs - with Flash, supporting graphics and colors that showcase the graphic designers artistic work.

Tens-of-thousands of dollars have been spent on cool website designs, only to be smacked down by an SEO-er, who enters the stage and tells you to start over.

Don’t be like the others, design a site that can more easily create link-bait (people willing to naturally come to your site via links, and their own creation of those) - and be aware that you are not the user.

Find out more about what user’s would like to see from your site as well - by offering polling and surveys (www.surveymonkey.com) and read this important useability guide:

What do customers want to see on your site?

Revealing new numbers from the Interactive Advertising Bureau released this week. They show big numbers in a fast growing market place. Are you illuminated online?

“Internet advertising revenues (U.S.) for the first six months of 2007 were nearly $10 billion, setting yet another new record and representing a nearly 27 percent increase over the first half of 2006.”

“Internet advertising revenue totaled nearly $5.1 billion for the second quarter of 2007, exceeding the $5 billion mark for the first time in a quarter, a 25.4 percent increase over the same period in 2006.”

Click the IAB Press Release for more information.