Multiple streams of traffic Search Engines 'n' such: Part I

You are free to publish this article online in your ezine website, ebook, or other online publication. The full resource box, including 'By line' must remain intact and be published with the article. If you publish this article, please contact me and let me know where you are using it. Contact at: artpub@newbie-guides.com --- **Article info** Word count: approx: 977 Hard-wrapped at 65 characters --- Multiple streams of traffic Search Engines 'n' such: Part I Not only do you want to get more traffic, you want to get more unique traffic! In order to achieve this, you need to create multiple streams of traffic for your site. Settling for one source of traffic is simply not enough for most small to mid-size sites, or home-based business sites. This is the first of four parts in a mini-series about generating multiple streams of traffic for your website. The remainder will be published here on newbie-guides over the next few days. Considering the competition most people experience with Search engines, not to mention the ever increasing trend towards 'pay for inclusion' with the major search engines, it can be a real challenge to get decent traffic from SE's alone (not impossible, just challenging). Likewise, most net advertising and promotion has become much less effective, in particular banner style advertisements are now not really much more use than creating brand awareness, and unless you get massive coverage with your banners, you won't create much awareness. This does not mean that you should skip these forms of traffic. That would be foolish. However, what it does mean is that you need to look for other, alternative, sources of traffic that can fill in the gaps, and provide additional traffic to your site. Two very good additional ways of increasing your traffic are 1) to make use of a variety of 'viral' marketing techniques, and 2) to promote your online presence in offline media (print, radio, TV, etc.). 1) Search Engines Search engines are still a fantastic source of traffic - probably the most important - because they will simply keep on producing traffic forever once your site has been indexed. The problem is getting a good placement (first page) on good keywords (ones that are relevant to your site and get lots of searches). This is not always easy, especially if you are in a competitive field. Even if you have a poor search engine placement, you will still get some traffic, however, a poor placement will result in very poor traffic flow. I won't go into the details of meta tags and search engine optimization here - there are literally dozens of sites that try to teach you how to do that. Check a few of them out. A word of warning however, be very careful with what you choose to believe when you read those sites. Unless they can prove they have produced many top 10 search engine placements on many different keywords, generally what they are telling/selling is rubbish. Remember what you are looking for is HIGHLY TARGETED traffic coming to your site because your site gives them what they need and want. *** side note *** I know from personal experience that the techniques taught by Stephan Peirce produce top results every time. After putting the information to use, the next time my sites were 'spidered', all of the results were top 10 for the keywords I had focused on! They were not all #1, although a few were, but it didn't matter, my traffic from search engines jumped significantly thanks to the information in his book. I also know that he himself uses these techniques to get hundreds of top 10 search engine placements for his own business and is approaching $1,000,000 in profits annually. *** There are two additional things to think about when you consider search engines. Well actually, there are many more things to talk about when it comes to search engines, but I'm only going to talk about two more: mis-spellings, and smaller search engines. Taking advantage of mis-spellings can be a great way to boost your search engine traffic. People frequently type too fast, and submit their search before they realize that they have mis-typed the word that they were searching for. As a webmaster, this can be quite good, as far fewer sites actually try to focus on the incorrect keywords. Of course the total number of searches made on mis-spelled keywords is much fewer than on correctly spelled keywords, but they can still generate a large amount of traffic with FAR less competition. Just as a quick example, as I write this, "web hosting" produces nearly 3.9 MILLION results, while "wbe hosting" produces 10,000! GoodKeywords from http://www.softnik.com/ is a great tool that allows you to quickly and easily find out how many searches are done on any keywords you like (including mis-spellings). It's free, and an invaluable resource! Lastly on search engines, is the importance of the smaller search engines. There are many benefits to the smaller search engines, but the most significant are that you get indexed more quickly, have fewer competitors, and can generate a solid amount of traffic for you. The huge engines (google, Lycos, inktomi) and indices (yahoo, DMOZ) can take weeks to add your site, if ever, and always put your site against 1000's of others. While there is no guarantee that you will be included in a smaller search engine, you will be 'spidered' much more quickly. And while they may not have millions of searches a day, there is no difference between 1000 visitors coming from 1 source (say google) and 1000 visitors coming from 5 sources (200 from each of several smaller engines). An additional benefit of the smaller search engines is that some (not all) have agreements with the main engines so that their content is spidered by the main engines - in essence giving the webmaster a 'backdoor' into the main engines. I hope that this gives you a bit of direction and hope as far as search engines are concerned. As I mentioned earlier, based on my own experience using the information, I highly recommend Stephan Peirce's book on traffic generation. He WILL make a difference in your website's success. --------------------------- Eric Koshinsky: webmaster and guide at Newbie-guides.com We aim to provide useful tips and guidance for those who are new to personal online marketing. 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