Guaranteeing an Increase in Your Site Traffic
Start at the goal. Walk backwards, feet on the ground. Then
forward. That is how you guarantee positive results for any
quest, including a guaranteed increase in your site traffic and
revenues. Let us take a brief look at this philosophy, then see
how we can use it to increase our site traffic, guaranteed. What
you will discover is that the most simple and affordable of
traffic building strategies are surprisingly obvious to only a
minority of webmasters around the world.
Walking backwards from the goal means starting at the end
result. Find something that has already reached the end result
that you are after. Observe it and analyze what causes this end
result, backtracking step by step from the end result to where
you are now. As you do so keep your feet on the ground, that is,
look at the pure facts of the matter. No hype, no "I hope" or "I
think", no theories. Just pure facts from observation. Finally
walk forward. Re-apply the facts you discovered, step-by-step,
without inventing or re-inventing anything. Follow blindly, no
matter how silly or simple the path you have uncovered may
appear to be. And you will be guaranteed success as long as you
are acting in the same environment as the one in which you
observed your end result.
I have had the opportunity to look at sites that have reasonably
high traffic levels (our desired end result). Having a look at
their server log files tells you exactly where the traffic is
coming from, stripped down to the bare facts. Log files don't
lie. The following truths emerge:
Fact (1): Most sites get a large proportion of their daily
traffic from popular search engines. This is by far the biggest
traffic driver to most sites. Another large traffic driver is
incoming links from other busy sites or from hundreds or
thousands of small sites. It is usually hard to directly
replicate a busy site's incoming links network so we won't dwell
on this. Instead we will focus on what is easy, replicating a
busy site's performance on search engine ranking across the
board. You will find that once your site is busy because of
search engine traffic, your incoming links network will grow
automatically as more people find your site and link to it.
Higher numbers of incoming links (called link popularity) boost
search engine rankings. It is a good vicious cycle that keeps
itself growing - and you want that!
This high search engine traffic depends on the following things:
Fact (2): The total number of pages the site has. The more the
pages, the higher the traffic. Why? Think about it. Say your
site has 10 pages only and each page draws in an average of
about 7 visitors a day that find it on the search engines.
That's 70 visitors a day (10 pages x 7 visitors per page). If
you now had 100 pages instead of similar nature, you would now
have about 7 x 100 = 700 visitors a day instead of 70. Its that
simple!
Fact (3): Basically, most sites get a trickle of traffic per
page on their site. Each page manages to get found by only a
relatively small number of people a day from the search engines,
depending on the search subject, usually only about 10 - 30 or
so people a day per page even on well visited sites. Why?
Because most pages on average on a particular site do not rank
highly on search results. But occasionally you will find a site
with dozens or hundreds of pages with good search engine
rankings. By pure chance or careful planning, these pages are
optimized for the search engines. Now say you had 100 pages each
pulling in an average of 10 visitors a day from the search
engines. Your competitor also has 100 pages but they pull in an
average of 70 (or even much more) visitors a day due to better
optimization. Guess who will be writing the success story.
Fact (4): Looking at the log files for keywords or phrases typed
into the search engines to find these sites (yes, log files can
tell you that, too), you discover that these busy sites are be
found by a much larger range of keywords than their less busy
competitors. For example, a low traffic site selling wedding
gowns may have, in all the text on all its pages, only about 10
keywords and phrases related to wedding gowns (e.g. wedding
gowns, weddings, marriage, bride, bride, etc). But a busy one
may have over 50 related words and phrases, including less
obvious but related ones such as registry service, bachelor
party, bucks night, wedding planner, etc. Even though the site
only sells wedding gowns, someone looking for a wedding planner
or bachelor party information would most likely also be
interested in wedding gowns. And on their search for these other
words, if they bump into a wedding gown site, they will be
interested in exploring it. Simple math: if one keyword gets you
10 unique visitors a day, 60 different keywords of a related
nature will get you 600 more unique visitors.
Fact (5): This last fact is obtained from simple observation of
search results on major search engines. If you search for any
term on most major search engines, you will notice that many of
the top ranking pages in the search results are the home pages
of web sites (i.e., the default page of a domain name, such as
index.htm, default.asp, index.html, etc). Also, the domain names
themselves often contain the keywords being search for (e.g. a
search for wedding gowns will result in pages with domains such
as weddinggowns.com, weddingshop.com, gownsforsale.com, etc.).
This is especially so with HotBot (www.hotbot.com). That is not
to say that other pages do not rank well. It just means that
your pages will rank better if the domain name or the page name
contains the keywords being searched for.
Now that you have seen how absolutely logical and easy it is to
get that much needed traffic to your web site, you can now go
ahead and make it happen for you. The only obstacle is one: to
make a significantly higher number of web pages than those that
you currently have, and make these for a wider variety of
related keywords than you already have, and optimize them all
for the several major search engines, is not exactly a simple
task if done manually. The hardest part is the optimization
because that is a mathematical and constantly changing thing
(the engines use math to rank pages and they constantly change
their formulas). There are several options available to you to
make your work easier. You could find a consultant who does
this. Usually, this is quite expensive but the advantage is that
you do not have to do anything yourself. You do have to be
careful to choose a good consultant and not just anyone trying
their luck at this. Your other option is to do it yourself. If
you have a lot of time and know-how of the workings of the
search engines, you could make templates and run them against
your set of keywords to create your pages. The only danger with
templates is that you could end up with duplicate pages that
spam the engines. And this method can be a messy process. Your
last and best option is to use software specifically designed
for this job. This is the fastest, most reliable and accurate
method. All you have to do is select the right software package
and everything else should take care of itself. This field is
very new and currently very few packages exist that offer enough
intelligence to do the job correctly. A search at ZDNet's
www.hotfiles.com should yield a selection of packages you can
evaluate.
There are many other ways that people use to find new sites,
such as following links on other sites, reading about sites on
magazine, hearing from friends, etc. But no matter what other
methods they use, they almost always use them in addition to
using the search engines, especially when actively trying to
locate new information. If there was one thing you could not
eliminate from a site's success driver and not ruin it, it is
most usually its traffic from the search engines. No other
method of marketing is so powerful, effective, and affordable to
the majority of sites on the Internet. In fact, it is virtually
free.