Chapter 5

[Bruceper]

Chapter 5 - Traffic, when a traffic jam a good thing

What is traffic? In the normal world we think of traffic as cars and trucks going down the street. Shop owners see traffic as the people that walk in and out of their doors. For website owners traffic is the number of visitors to our sites we get on a daily or monthly basis.

I need to give an explanation right now of the difference between hits and traffic. They do NOT mean the same thing, not even close. A unique visit, is when one person on a computer visits your site. That is a "unique". Every item that person's browser requests on your website is a hit. This means when they visit your site and you have your page (1 hit) and 14 images (14 hits) on that page the user has now generated 15 hits just by visiting the one single page on your site. Now if he or she goes to another page that is another hit for that page plus as many hits for the number of images on that page.

In all, one single user can generate hundreds of hits on a website in a day. Hits in the real world of website statistics mean NOTHING. If you tell an experienced webmaster how many hits you get because you're trying to brag about your site they will ignore you. The real metric of website traffic is uniques.

Your website could generate 1500 hits a day, and that sounds impressive. But that could mean that only 6 people visited your site, and that's not impressive. You want unique traffic which will help to generate word of mouth advertising, submissions to your directory, and clicks on your advertisements.

So how do you get traffic? Well you can make a website, and let it sit there for months and hope that somehow Google finds it and adds it to their search engine. Then when someone searches you have to hope that they can find you somewhere in all those listings.

Another way is to add your site to another directory that is related to you, or to add yourself to a number of general directories. This way people may find you easier, but search engines will find out about your site from those links and will come and visit you. Then you'll get traffic from those search engines since now they know your site exists.

You can also get traffic by using Google Adwords or similar advertising systems and purchasing ads so users will hopefully visit your site to see what you have to offer.

Yet another way is to get links added to sites that link to you, and then you link to your other sites.

Traffic isn't easy to come by, some sites will sit for months with very little traffic and increase slowly. Other sites will explode and get a large amount of traffic quickly. I'll go further into detail on how you can get more traffic for your site.

We'll start with adding your own site to a search engine and other directories. Most search engines offer a place where you can submit your own site and they will eventually add you to their search engine. Getting your site added to a search engine can take weeks, months or years. Some search engines offer paid services to have your link added to their search engine rather quickly. This is a farce and I suggest you don't pay these fees unless you are really desperate. There are better ways to get traffic for less cost or for no cost.

Yahoo offers a submission service into the Yahoo Directory for the cost of $299US. That's not a cheap price at all. That doesn't mean you're going to get any visitors, it just means you're going to be added to their Directory. For the same cost of $299 you could get 5980 guaranteed visitors to your site using Google Adwords if your cost per click was only five cents. That's a big difference.

I'll cover more about Adwords in Chapter 8. For now I'll just say that when paying for ads on Google, you only pay when they click on your ad. As I said above, if you paid the $299 and your cost per click (CPC) was five cents you would guarantee 5980 visits, but your ad could be shown to tens or even hundreds of thousands of visitors! That's what is called exposure and it's actually free from Google.

Traffic can also be added by visiting related forums and making posts to direct users to your site. Only do this if someone is looking for information you offer, otherwise it would be considered spam. Of course you could just sit and talk on the forum all day long and add the link to your site as a signature. This way your site gets seen a lot and search engines will pick up your link the next time they visit that forum.

Usenet discussions are also a good place to use a signature in a discussion. If you're on a relavent newsgroup and have a signature that interests people they will visit the link you offer.

Never forget to try and link to your own sites from sites that you currently run. This is a great and free way to get your link seen by visitors. In cases like this you could add a section called Sponsors where you could list unrelated sites. Be careful not to add too many or search engines could penalize you. I have found that on a page with a lot of relavent content you can easily get away with five to ten unrelated links without penalty.

In regards to SEO or Search Engine Optimization. There are plenty of books out there on how to best optimize your site to get listed higher in search engines and many of them have the same information and many of them are very different. Simply due to the number of sites out there I'm not going to get too far into SEO in this book.

What does SEO have to do with traffic? Pretty much everything. Any site on the net can get listed in one or more of the search engines. But it takes hard work and a lot of time to get your site where it really counts, and that's in the top three listing on the major search engines. This is yet another reason why I like specialized directories because you have less competition in fighting for those top spots.

To make it in those top spots you need to do all your usual SEO tricks (get an SEO book if you want to know more on this topic) such as keywords, meta descriptions, page titles, content relavent text, backlinks, regular updates and changes and an introduction on your index page that tells visitors what your site is about while keeping it short and simple.

Right now I know one of my sites is listed in Google somewhere. I've searched for it but I still can't find what page it's on. This is one of more neglected directories that I really need to get to work on. It has about 40 listings in it and hasn't been updated in months. However I have a number of sites that are regularly in the top position of Google or in the top three. These are the sites which make me the most money.

Are you looking for a dmoz slice? Go ahead and type that into Google, I just checked and my site is listed as number one and number two. Are you looking for usenet links? A site I sold three years ago to finance buying my house is still in the number one position on Google for that subject. While it isn't a directory, if you're looking for a pocket bike forum go ahead and search, my site is listed as number two. Yes listings change all the time and by the time you read this these links could be gone or perhaps moved up or down in the listings.

The point is, it takes a lot of hard work to get listed in the top of a search engine and get traffic out of it. So let's go through the steps I mentioned earlier. None of them are more important than the other, you must work on them all equally!

Keywords are an extremely important way for search engines to know what your site is about. The more times a keyword shows up on differing pages then a search engines can use that word to weigh your site against others.

Meta descriptions give search engines a description of each page or the overall description of the site. Having different descriptions on each page means the search engine will be able to sort your site better. Note that not all search engines use meta tag data, and some that read meta tag data do not "officially" use it for their index.

Page titles are another way a search engine and also many directory sites can list your site. The page title should be relavent to what is on the page the user or search engine is looking at.

Content relavent text is a big item and this is where people go crazy and add a huge list of keywords to push themselves into search engines. Doing things like that will only get your site banned from search engines. Put in a paragraph of text that is relavent to the topic of the page. This is the unique content that you're trying to add and if it's not there, search engines will pass you over.

Backlinks are the one exception here. They are more important than the rest of the list. The more backlinks you have the better. Backlinks are sites that link to you. Google uses backlinks to determine your Page Rank value and to figure out what site should be listed first. The more backlinks a site has, the more often it will show up ahead of other sites that have the same keywords.

Regular updates and changes to your site are necessary for search engines to realize that your site isn't dead. Also the more a search engine sees that the sites data has changed the faster it will come back to visit you again. If you update weekly then you may be visited weekly by the search engine. Not all of them work like this, and just because you update doesn't mean they will come back. But it is a good way to help the search engines come for extra visits.

The introduction on your index page should be short, sweet and to the point. It should say what your site is about and what users can do there. Many search engines have systems that look for this kind of text and this is what they enter as the description for your site. This is also what users see when they visit the site and if they like what they see then they'll stay a while.

SEO pays in many ways. By allowing you to achieve better rankings in search engines you will receive more traffic. More traffic means the possibility of people adding their own links to your directory and it also means an increase of clicks on your advertisements which help you make money.

Another great way to get traffic is to buy a domain. Now you wonder what I'm talking about since you already bought a domain. Don't worry, I'll explain. There are three ways you can get traffic from a domain name that you buy. You can buy an expiring domain name, you can buy a domain name that already gets traffic or you can buy a keyword domain name.

Buying an expiring domain is a tricky process. You need to do a lot of research to see if the domain actually gets traffic. You need to check if the domain already has backlinks. You also will need to join a site or two where you can purchase expiring domains or bid on them. Expiring domain names is a big business and there are many people who purchase these names just so they can have a name that already gets traffic and has backlinks. Be careful not to bid too much as some domains may lose traffic quickly or backlinks may die off.

You can buy a domain that is still active and that gets traffic already. There are many sites on the internet where you can buy these types of domains. Never take anyone's word as to how much traffic a site gets and always ask to see statistics from the last 90 days if possible. Traffic domains can range from a few dollars to thousands of dollars depending on how much traffic they get.

Lastly you can buy a keyword domain. This is a domain name that contains a keyword that you want to make a directory about. For instance if your directory was going to be about marijuana you might be interested to know that marijuana.com was for sale within the last two years. That would sure get you a lot of traffic as many people simply type the keyword they want in their browsers address bar. If you typed in marijuana most browsers would add .com and send you there. Marijuana.com was listed for sale at a steal of a deal price for only 1.1 million dollars.

Obviously you're not going to pay that much. But perhaps like the domain I used in my first example, fishing-links.com, you might be able to purchase that name from someone for only a few hundred dollars. Some times it really is a toss up as to what you will pay for a keyword domain that has traffic. The better the keyword the higher the price. But some sellers go crazy and want big dollars for domains that aren't worth it. If you want a second opinion on a domains value then ask in a reputable forum. Do NOT use any site on the internet that offers to give you an appraisal. Most of those sites are scams.

Buying one of the types of domains listed above can set you back some cash. But if you have the cash available and want to build quickly it may be the way to go. I've bought and sold all different types of domains ranging in price from a few dollars to thousands of dollars. I never went "big time" and went for the huge money domains as the market there is smaller and you find less buyers and sellers. It's a great way to start off, but it may not be for you. Do your research first and don't take anything anyone says for granted.

Using all of the information I have provided will get you more traffic and will increase your income. Be patient and the work you put into your directory will come back to you in the form of a paycheck.

Copyright 2008 Bruce Peresky - All Rights Reserved - No duplication permitted without written permission from the author

[ExoDot]

Thanks for post this. I leard alot from this chapter, now I got about 4 visted every couple of hour. Thanks.

[inspireme]

you can see how people get to your site using services like hittail.com - nice to use for a month so you can work out phrases people are using and then turning them into featured pages, targetted exactly to that phrase... you can pick up loads of longtail terms and get 100s of visitors quite easily this way