Forum Moderators: mack
Whats the best way to bring visitors and traffic in?
I’m relatively new to all this. Any help would be greatful.
(1) Expensive way - advertise your site at Google, Yahoo, etc
(2) Cheap (or free) way - optimize your site in major search engines
If you can't wait to have visitors to your site then go ahead and advertise your site in Google and Yahoo! Can you afford 10 cent per click? If you have something to sell then this might be the right choice for you.
The best way of course (in my case) is through optimizing your site in major search engines. Concentrate on 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Always check your site statistic. Analyse how visitors found your site. What keywords they used to find your site? Check out how your site ranked in major search engines through these keywords, the length of time they spent at your site, etc.
If your site is currently not spidered by the search engines then you need someone to link to your site to get spidered (if not you might have to wait for months to be visible in major search engines). I have personally seen one site that is still not spidered by 3 major search engines mentioned earlier after being online for 8 months! I think out of pity I should email the "webmaster" (webmaster?) of that site later.
Getting traffic is not enough! This is what I learned. You need to have a constantly updated great content (related to keywords that visitors used to find your site) in order to have return visitors and many page views. Having a great forum such as this one will help your site to get traffic. Having links to your site in great sites such as this one will get you free/paid traffic. Always remember this: Traffic and content are related.
I hope this will help you to get started.
Can you please explain what you mean by “optimizing your site in major search engines?”
And how do I “optimize” it?
Thanks.
If you're putting up a brand new site, you're going to have to wait a few weeks until it gets crawled anyway... search engines have too many pages to check out to be viewing your updated content in real-time. You could have an amazing site as far as SEO goes, yet the first day you put it live, your rankings in the search engines are lower. So don't stress out about the here and now.
Some generally accepted optimization techniques:
Have the keywords that are important to your site plastered within your content and meta tags.(if you are selling goat milk, you really should have the phrase "goat milk" in your page as much as possible without looking silly. Of course, having the phrase "goat milk" in your site already makes you a little silly.)
Reciprocal links: contact other websites that you think your users surf alot, or that have complimentary content to yours, and try a link exchange. The more links to your site are out on the net, the better of you generally are.
It gets very detailed, and there's plenty of people here whose knowledge of the subject puts my little comments to shame... so check out those forums I mentioned.
Can I just ask how do I check my website ranking?
That's what I did with my sites and I get plenty of traffic (and revenue). Make the best possible site you can and success will follow. If you try to do it the other way -- focusing on success rather than focusing on quality -- you probably won't have either.
When you create a high-quality site with killer content then others will naturally link to it. When you got a bunch of links from other *quality* sites you'll get good traffic from those links, as well as good search rankings.
Also see [url=http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/2010.htm]Brett's guide to building a successful site in 12 months].
