The Naked Truth About Website Traffic

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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.

Watch. Copy. Get Massive Traffic.
Discover The Art Of Web Traffic 2.0
And Get A Free, 40-Page Traffic E-Book:

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(aff)

At the heart of the Internet lies one simple truth: keywords.

It’s how potential customers find you. If you are new to this business, or have existed for a while, the “fishing” of these customers is an ongoing exercise - not just from keyword research, but sales copy and conversion techniques on your site.

Would you like to know what keywords the competition is bidding on, how much, etc?

Today - however, you can start by giving yourself a fair advantage and spy on the competition using a tool called spyfu.

Check competitive keyword spying, and see how you like it.

Recent announcements for Yahoo & MSN are only partly interesting. Google is such the King Of Search Engines and if you are ranked there for power search terms, it’s a good place to be.

But, for PPC and SEO, you typically can not only get cheaper traffic (PPC) and get ranked faster (SEO), for Yahoo and MSN, but it’s broader exposure - so include all your tags and quality content on every page. Continue testing for conversion and add more pages and update Yahoo SiteExplorer as well.

Yahoo Search News - Weather Report Update

MSN Search News - Search Updates

The above picture reflects current technology. The camera on the left was just released and is the size of (right) chewing gum. How can Universal Search be related?

Answer: Video! Make sure that you read the Google announcement of Universal Search earlier this year.

The device above can capture video and allow publishing to places like YouTube. Optimization rules still apply (titles, url names & more). Can you imagine all the possibilities here?

If you are not taking advantage of videos, blogs, podcasts, news, articles, audio, etc - you are missing out on the next wave called social media optimization. Any SEO-ean who is not providing this as a service to themselves or clients…. well, you know the rest.

Find out more by starting with a corporate blog (free to try).

Google once again is King of Search.

As seen in the hitwise intelligence report, it’s pretty obvious the big is getting bigger…

“Google accounted for 63.98 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending September 1, 2007. Yahoo! Search at 22.87, MSN Search at 7.98 and Ask.com at 3.41 each”..

Download the August Nielsen Netratings PDF for more.

Are you taking advantage of the search engines for your business?

Outside of quality content on pages of your website, links (internally & externally) is sound advice. In fact, just optimizing your internal website link strategy can rank you much higher.

For external back links, make sure you:

• Use the keyword/phrase in the anchor text - use the keyword you want to be ranked for
• Make sure you get a link from a relevant page. 10 links is much better than 100 links if relevant.
• Ensure that the link goes to a relevant page - your landing page - with a “call-to-action” message
• Any link from an authority site is good - this creates trustrank and pagerank for yourself.
• Getting links from blogs and related sites is great - but make sure that the link doesn’t have a no-follow on it. Check your HTML source, or install SEO Book tool for Firefox, and it will automatically highlight it for you.

Tip: Social linking (social neworks and bookmarking sites) can and will bring you traffic, but not all sites will pass link juice. You can get links from web2.0 sites http://www.techcrunch40.com/2007/index.php  and http://www.go2web20.net

That will help you get started.