Website Traffic Tactics

Myth – You need a 5-figure marketing budget to get your website on the first page of Google for your chosen keyword phrases!

This simply isn’t true. With a bit of time and persistence ANYONE can beat the big Fortune 500 companies (that spend thousands on SEO) at their own game.

Why is it so important to get your site on the first page of Google?

In most countries, Google is the preferred search engine for over 60% of web users, with Yahoo a distant second at between 15% & 20%. Get your site ranked highly on Google – where you’ll get most of your traffic from – and your rankings in the other search engines will take care of themselves.

Secondly, if you’re not on the first page of Google – & hopefully in the top 3 – you’re not going to see much search traffic. Studies have shown that the site with the #1 ranking will receive about 35% of the searches, #2 about 15%, & #3 about 11%. By the time you reach #10, they only receive about 2%!

This shows the incredible value of having good rankings on Google for your chosen keyword phrases.

So how do you rank for a particular keyword phrase?

Links & content…keyword rich links from other websites to our own. These links shouldn’t just be pointing to the home page of our site, but spread across the internal pages of the site as well.

These keyword rich links or anchor text need to be your keyword phrase hyperlinked  with your website address. For example, Australian wholesalers is a keyword rich link to the home page of this site for the keyword phrase, Australian wholesalers.

It also helps to make sure you update your site as often as possible with some quality, relevant content. Having a blog as part of your site is a great way to do this. I’d suggest once a week as a minimum, but the more often the better!

There are a few on page things you can do that will help – meta tags, header tags, keyword rich content, keyword rich domain – but for most keyword phrases, this alone won’t be enough to get you the top rankings. You’ll still need to build off page links.

How do you get these links?

There are many different ways to build those priceless backlinks to your site, but I’ll just go through some of the more common free methods.

1. Article Marketing – Article marketing involves writing articles (usually around 400 to 700 words in length) that are targeted to the type of people you want to attract to your store. You then submit these articles to several popular article directories on the net. A couple of the best are EzineArticles & ArticlesBase, but there are literally thousands you can use.
2. Press Releases – Anyone can submit a free press release about their business. Just do a search on Google for ‘free press release site’ and submit yours. Press releases are a great way for not only building links, but gaining possible media exposure for your business. I was once contacted by a radio station for an interview following a press release I did for one of my sites!
3. Blog Commenting – Find blogs in your niche & start getting involved by commenting on their blog posts. Try to make the comments thoughtful & helpful as this will increase your chances of getting the comment approved.
4. Forum Signatures/Posting – Find forums in your niches & start hanging around a bit. Get involved and help others out by answering their questions. Try to avoid blatantly promoting your site – this will get you banned – but you should be ok to include a link here & there if it will help. Many also allow signatures in which you can link to your site.
5. Social Marketing – Social marketing is quite big these days, but on Facebook, Twitter & a huge array of smaller sites. You could start your own Facebook fan page & offer people an incentive to sign up – free information, product discounts etc.
6. Video Marketing – Create a video related to your niche & upload it to YouTube, MetaCafe and other video sites. You can create one using a digital video recorder or on your computer using free screen recording software like CamStudio.

You’ll also find that these methods not only help in building backlinks, but also help to drive traffic directly to your site as an added bonus.

So let’s get started today! Figure out how much time you can put into these methods, then work out a weekly plan to promote your site. Maybe you could write & submit 3 articles, make 5 blog comments, 5 forum posts & 2 videos!

Whatever you think you can do…set a plan & make a start now. Every little bit will help to drive more of that web traffic to your site & not your competitors.