My Top Tactics for Increasing Site Traffic

I've been attracting traffic to my sites since 1993. Below are my best practices for getting the right audience to discover you. Enjoy, and please pass these tips along to colleagues you think will benefit from them.

1. You Should be Thinking About Linking: You know what? Life really is a popularity contest. And the Web is just like life because link popularity means so much when it comes to building traffic to your site. Getting highly respected popular sites to point at you pays double-dividends:

1. It's human nature to accept and visit a site that is hyperlinked from what is known as an Authority/Hub site. People just naturally feel better about you and your company when a respected source points to you.
2. When a search engine sees so many quality sites pointing at you, it assumes there's a good reason for this and therefore ranks you higher in search results. So you get more traffic from search results as a result of more sites pointing to you.

The trick is to figure out what makes or will make sites link to you. This is perhaps the first question you need to ask yourself before designing or redesigning you site. Imagine yourself calling or emailing a target site and asking for a link. What will you tell them when they ask why they should do so?

2. Off-page Optimization: You hear this phrase often from SEO gurus like Mike Grehan. Yes, getting relevant and popular sites to link to you is one example of off-page optimization. Keep in mind, though, there are other aspects to this gambit. Remember, search engines put a lot of stock in the anchor text of those links. So if you can influence what words go into the link tags themselves, so much the better.

Search engines also look at who's pointing at the sites pointing at you. Just because a site has a high keyword density score isn't going to mean so much if nobody else of any consequence is pointing to it.

Top Tip: Search engines place an especially high value on .edu sites. So if you can get educational institutions to point to your site, this should help you a great deal.

3. Create a Real Simple Syndication Feed (RSS) For a Really Simple Reason: It will get you extended coverage. Your messaging is more likely to come up in Google News and Yahoo News and the like if the keywords in your "wrapper" match the keyword preferences selected when that user sets up his/her preferences for the type of feeds he/she wants to receive.

BTW, recent research shows that many people who receive RSS feeds aren't aware they are doing so. It's just another feed, like Associated Press or Reuters, etc.

I'm not a fan of simply cloning the content of one channel and pushing it through another simultaneously, though. If you have an email newsletter, you could wind up cannibalizing your subscribers. You should also package content appropriate for each medium. What comes across well in an email newsletter may be confusing in an RSS feed.

Whatever you do, don't just stuff your press releases through the RSS channel unless they happen to be very interesting or you have analysts whose job it is to track your every move. Remember, it's just as easy to unsubscribe from an RSS feed as it is from an email newsletter.

It is your hope that other websites pick up your feed and point back to your site, creating more traffic to you. So whatever content you do push through your RSS feed, make sure you are comfortable having that content live on other websites.

4. You'd Better Blog: Why? Because search engines sensitive to how often you update your site. You can have all the keyword phrases and density optimization in force, but you'll keep falling in search engine results if your site hasn't been touched in months.

Having said that, I want you to think long and hard about committing to blogging. In order for it to work well, you've got to blog often. Once a day would be nice. At least once a week is necessary in my view. How will it look if someone comes to your site and sees the last posting was two months ago? Who reads yesterday's newspapers? Not people, not search engines.

5. Make Your Website the Center of Your Marketing Campaign: I see so many TV spots, radio and print ads that simply say at the end, "Oh yeah, visit our website at www.whateverrrr.com." They make it an afterthought. They don't give you any incentive to visit their website.

Why not make your website the whole point of your marketing campaign? B2B marketers do this by offering white papers and Webinars in newsletters like Web Digest For Marketers.

At the time of writing, Chevrolet is advertising an opportunity to have your commercial be the one that runs for Chevy during the Super Bowl. How cool is that? It's involving. Kudos to them and the creatives that thought that one up.

"Make your website the hero" is what I often suggest to clients during concept sessions when they're trying to figure out how to get the most out of their marketing budgets. You've already got the website. Have some fun with it.

6. Press the Flesh: Don't just sit back and let electronics be your proxy. Get yourself and your respective people circulating in front of your target groups. If you speak on a trade show panel or give a keynote, have something prepared especially for the attendees at your website. Refer to it when speaking, on your business cards and in handouts. If it's a tradeshow and you have some leverage in your industry, you may ask the show sponsor for some ad space in trade for speaking so you can further promote what awaits the reader at your website. Think of this gambit as the equivalent to the prize inside the Cracker Jack box.

7. Be Newsworthy: Make a public observation that runs against the common wisdom of the day in your field. This draws attention to you and ro your company's website by extension. Of course, you really need to believe in your observation. You can only be wrong in public so many times.

8. On-Page Optimization: This is one of those cool-sounding SEO expert terms. I mentioned earlier about off-page optimization methods. With off-page optimization you typically have much less control because what you want done is on other people's websites. But with on-page optimization, you're in control.

Yes, there are the usual suspects like your title tags (you'd be surprise how many still read "Home Page"), your alt and meta tags, your proper and optimized use of keyword phrases and keyword density, too.

But how about the words or phrases (ie., anchor text) you use to link from one page to the next within your site, hmm? Some call this page reputation. In the same you want other sites to refer to your site in a particular way, you want to also refer to your internal pages in a particular way. You're not doing the reputation of your internal pages any favors by referring to them as Page 2 of 6. You want to label links to those pages with words that have a direct connection to the content that's on them.

Labeling the link with text like "Read More Reviews of Email Marketing Websites" will not only help human visitors, it will help Web spiders that come around indexing your site for the purposes of search engine results.

9. Web Metrics Matter: You've got to look under the hood and see what effects your SEO, PPC, PR and ad campaigns are having on your site. An astounding percentage of companies that spend real money on PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns do not track the effects of different campaigns on their site. That's like sailing without a rudder.

Setting up different landing pages to see which keywords pull better than others and which ones cause visitors to take action is all important. This is where Internet Marketing has it all over any other medium. Sure you can get campaigns out there quicker and cheaper than you can in traditional media. But what's the point... unless you know what's really happening to your investment? You should follow your Internet Marketing campaigns in the same way you follow a stock you have in your portfolio. After all, they're both investments.

People who have never used a Web metrics program don't realize they can actually see which keywords people used in order to find them at Google or Yahoo. Now, some Internet Marketing insiders are saying, "Oh sure, Larry, duh." My response is, most people really don't know how much is trackable online. I notice Internet marketers are a clannish bunch. They talk amongst themselves mostly, and thereby forget what the rest of the universe doesn't yet know.

There is nothing like seeing the epiphany on a client's face when he or she sees for the first time what is knowable online.

10. The Power of Passalong: Publishers of periodicals know well the power of passalong. As publisher of Web Digest For Marketers, I notice I often have twice as many non-subscribers reading the publication as those who are subscribed. When an issue's topic is really hot, I've seen that ratio climb to 3 to 1.

Those people who get my newsletter passed along to them are quite apt to go to my site and subscribe, if they like what they read. This is why I always call out to non-subscribers at the top of the newsletter and show them where to subscribe.

My traffic numbers soar on the days when I publish Web Digest For Marketers. Passalong has always been a publisher's friend. But on the Internet, you can see the cause and effect most directly when looking at your site stats on the day you publish your email newsletter.

If the reader finds the content of high enough value, he/she might not only pass it along, but also might hold on to the issue, thus extending the shelf life of your newsletter. Over the years, I've met hundreds of people at trade shows who say they hold on to issues for years.

I've had many advertisers report that they receive clicks on their ads many months after that advert originally appeared. The tail is most definitely getting longer on clickthroughs.

Sure, you get most of your traffic in the first 48-72 hours, but don't take those landing pages down prematurely. Leave them up for as long as possible and be sure to go back and look at results for those pages many months after the fact.

BONUS TIP

11. Bank on Article Banks: If you are a prolific writer, or have the budget to hire a prolific writer, consider publishing a series of articles germane to your line of business. Aside from hosting these articles periodically on your own site, you should shop around for well-respected sites that are called "article banks". Make sure that the quality of articles found on the sites you're considering matches the quality of your own work. Don't just post them everywhere willy-nilly. The article bank sites will post your articles for others to read with credit to you as the author and with links back to your site, thereby increasing your number of incoming links.

Do your research. Some article banks have terms and conditions that allow other sites to take your articles and post them in turn on their own sites. Think long and hard about posting on these types of sites. It can work for you and quickly build your number of incoming links, but bear in mind that you will lose control over the environment in which your articles appear.