How to get traffic

[vbPoetess]

I know G$ adwords could be an option but for newbie it could be difficult to complet adwords to adsense money cycle.
So what are other acceptable ways.

[europeforvisitors]

Assuming that your site has content of intrinsic value and wasn't "made for AdSense," you should just do what people have been doing since long before AdSense came along:

Submit your site to the ODP, try to get links from quality sites on your topic, and wait for traffic to build via search-engine results and word of mouth.

[mrdomainnames]

This is a great question because I have new site - only about 2+ months old. I have submitted it to the ODP, and other search engines. I have also linked to other related sites, asked (and received) reciprocal links from decent PR rankked sites, placed an RSS feed with related topics, etc.
But very little traffic is coming to me (like 5 visitors/day)
This is so maddening.
Can someone with experience in a newer site (within the past 6 months to 1 year) tell us how longit takes for all these things to start getting traffic?

I'm Totally frustrated and losing hope.

Thanks!

[caran1]

what is the topic/general area of your website? if there are a lot of websites in that field you will get less traffic

[vbPoetess]

what is that ODP ...?

[genesislogic]

I suggest looking at this post

[webmasterworld.com...]

well worth your studying

[ken_b]

You might get more responses if this was posted in a forum that was appropriate for the topic, like the general Webmaster forum.

This is the Adsense forum. While getting traffic is important to Adsense publishers, it is not the focus of this forum as I understand it.

[mrdomainnames]

ODP stands for the Open Directory Project a/k/a
dmoz.org

[sailorjwd]

mrd,

I have some bad news for you...

I have an adwords campaign similar to the scholarship thing (I have something to do with Pell Grants). There is simply very little search activity for this subject. I also notice you have zero backlinks from other sites.

The doggie site... I couldn't think of many different search phrases that would pertain to your site... You don't rank for Dog Training or anything close to that and that kills your visitor potential.

[Swebbie]

I have a dog site, and let me tell you, that sucker is HARD work to get any organic SE traffic on a regular basis. Seems there is a ton of competition out there. I love dogs, so that site is more a labor of love than one I expect a lot of money from, but I'd hate to be someone trying to earn a living on it. It's taken me almost 2 years to get any kind of traffic without paying for it.

[Atlantis13]

Ok, I understand market saturation, ie: dogs, cats, insurance, etc. Very competitive keyword subjects.

So then the object would be to narrow the niche, correct? So that you would have Dogs>Chihuahua. But that is also very competitive.

My point is, for us newbies (I've been self-taught for 5 years and own and operate several educational/news/information sites, but just beginning to optimize for Adsense without having to resort to black hat methods), where does it stop?

Your answer will be that we need to narrow our niche even further. Now you're in to widgets, hopefully unique widgets, at that.

So, now I am someone with an interest in- and knowledge about dogs in general, with no hope of competing for Adsense dollars, much less traffic generation. So I have to narrow that to Chihuahuas. Still too competitive. So now I have to narrow that even further to a Chihuahua widget(s), let's say Chihuahua-sized knit sweaters and/or whatever else.

You might say, "There you go! Widgets for Chihuahuas!" But what do I know about widgets for Chihuahuas? My knowledge and interest was about dogs in general.

On a similar note: I ran across a university press release recently that was appropriate to my site. It was about the Harp, a stringed musical instrument dating to ancient times. I thought this would be a great niche subject, highly specialized. Afterall, only Harpists and those who love harp music will need this information. I should have no problem achieving a high ranking in the SERPs for "Harp", right?

Wrong! Google returned 3.75 million results. Even when you filter out all the non-musical-instrument "harp" results, the result is still daunting.

So, back to my point. If my interest is chihuahua widgets or harps, I'm just reinventing the wheel. It's already done. It's competitive. So how do I generate traffic? How do I generate an Adsense income? How do I narrow it down enough so that there's not millions of competing pages and sites?

[JoeT321]

allinanchor:harp

178,000 results, looks good to me.

I just came out on top for a keyphrase that has 900,000 results and I started my site in January.

[JonnyQ888]

You don't really need to worry about all of the competing sites, just the ones on the first page. Find out how many backlinks they have, look at their SEO, check their keyword density. If they don't have many backlinks and they aren't optimizing their site well then you have a chance of knocking them down in the rankings. If they have hundereds of backlinks and good SEO, look for another topic. My site was put up in May. I am currently #1 for my main keyword phrase on MSN, 1 out of 592,992 other sites. I was bouncing between #3 and 4 on Yahoo until this latest update and there were 1.7 million results there. All I've done is work on my keyword density, used H tags, and got backlinks. Don't worry about how many sites there are, just worry about what the top 10 are doing.

[sven1977]

JonnyQ888, what do h-tags do? How do I use them to do SEO?
Thanks,
Sven

[JonnyQ888]

The h tags are the header tags, h1, h2, etc. The search engines seem to take the words that are in the tags into account when doing the rankings as part of the algorithm. So for the title of an article I will put the keywords in h1 tags and h2 tags for the subsections. I don't know if that makes any sense.

[DXL]

For some reason, people to be selling a lot of dog training or puppy training sites on ebay and elsewhere. I googled a snippet of text on one of them, and pages of sites with the exact same content popped up.

The web is saturated with dog training sites, unless you actually love dog training, I'd focus on another type of site if what you're looking for is traffic, and subsequently ad revenue.