How I Boosted My Woeful Web Traffic

You’re looking for ways to improve your sluggish web traffic which needs a big kick.

Yes, I know this topic has been covered countless of times on the net but I’d like to approach it from the angle of someone who is learning the process. So as I sat through filtering and sifting through articles on online marketing, all I can tell you is what worked for me.

Being a new webmaster, publisher or blogger may mean that you may not be getting much traffic. If you are one of those publishers who actually cares about reaching an audience of some sort then you are probably annoyed when you stumble across cloakers, spammers and content thieves who rank way higher than you do, taking note that sadly, your site does not appear on searches. You’ve visited all those places that talk about how you can build a better site, how you can trade your eyeballs for credit, how you can pay off people to get you a Google ranking. You have tried the online equivalent of hooting like a banshee and stripping down to your skivvies to get the attention you feel you deserve — gee, it’s tough to get your voice heard in the ever increasing congestion of the internet. But there are probably good reasons why hardly anyone’s noticed you. Your site just isn’t happening, despite your incredibly unique content, awesome layout and professional web site design.

Well, fear not, as there are now tools and techniques available that should help you gain traction fairly and honestly, albeit gradually.

The good news is that you actually already realize you don’t have traffic to be wondering about wanting more of it. Start out by keeping track of who visits you and why they do; you can find out more about your hits by getting one of those widgets that lets you track your visitors. If you have been posting in a vacuum thinking people are reading your material, then you’ll be horrified to know that in reality, you’re talking to the wind. So go to the nearest site tracker and start using it to see this stark painful reality for yourself.

Now back to the question of why your traffic may be lousy (interestingly, “lousy” is a relative term as one’s poor showing may be manna to somebody else, but what I mean is that your traffic is stagnant):

1. You’re not SEO optimized.
2. Your site is too slow.
3. You don’t have enough quality links pointing to you.
4. You’re not doing enough marketing nor are you making yourself known to your target audience.
5. You’re not making your site available for the bots out there.
6. You’re probably in the Google sandbox.

Again, all these things have befallen your site because you are fairly new to the game. So how can you expedite the process of being discovered by your target audience?

From the lists within lists out there that were crafted by experts and gurus of this well worn subject, I offer my own opinions. There are just so many ways to grab eyeballs for your site but just too little time and inclination to do them all, so I went about selectively applying some ideas and from that, I’ve culled my own rehashed and reassembled items from the list factory which I thought seemed easy to attempt with no money down.

1. You’re not SEO optimized.
   Apply SEO techniques to your site. You need to find the right keywords and add them to your HTML TITLE, META Keywords, META Description and Alt Tags. Use SEO tools like this keyword selector tool to help you with keyword analysis. I haven’t been completely diligent about this but will hop to it!
2. Your site is too slow.
   Users may turn away from your site if it takes too long to load so improve its performance by watching where you put the javascript web service widgets you may have on your site or blog. They take some time to render so place them at a point in your page where they can be rendered after everything else as much as possible, which may earn you the Holy Grail. Always add height and width parameters to images you use in your posts so that the browser can lay out the page without waiting for the image. Also reduce the images’ clarity to 40% or less to make their footprint smaller, which you can do with Photoshop or something similar, such as this free tool called — amusingly enough — the Gimp. And to see how awesome a job you’ve done with page optimization, run your pages through this Web Page Optimizer and see how you stack up!
3. You don’t have enough quality links pointing to you.
   Quality links are desired because these are supposedly what the search engines are using to “rank” your site. If you aren’t too shy, you can contact link sources to ask if they’d be willing to link to you. There are also such things as link exchange directories which facilitate the link swap among similar sites, but many of these link exchanges are paid services. Moreover, you can drop your online calling card at somebody else’s site by leaving them insightful and useful comments and pointers to your homepage. Look for a blogroll of people that share the same theme as your site does and join it, or offer your own link building plan (check mine out while you’re at it!). What will get you relevant quality links is the “discovery” of your site, and if Google isn’t doing this for you then other networks, directories and search engines may. I’d be interested to know which site discovery channels are indeed the most helpful for people. I’ve tried out the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN), the highly touted free directory DMOZ, a handful of blog directories and Technorati. BlogExplosion and BlogMad are traffic generating (or traffic trading) sites but may not yield targetted users since these visitors tend to be surfers looking to trade their traffic for yours.
4. You’re not doing enough marketing nor are you making yourself known to your target audience.
   Did anyone tell you that you need to write from 3 - 5 posts a week hopefully with good, substantive content? Well, they’re not kidding (and I initially thought they were!) And if you’re doing news, you need to up that number due to time sensitivity. Then you need to tag your posts for them to be seen in Technorati, and even in other social bookmarking networks such as delicious. Submit your good writeups to these social sites, blog networks, blog carnivals or ezines and you will gradually acquire target readers. Based on my referring urls, what hasn’t really worked as well for me is site submission, but maybe that’s because I haven’t really done too much of it and I read that it sometimes takes a while for your site to be included (in DMOZ, it could take a year!).
5. You’re not making your site available for the bots and RSS readers out there.
   The bots and spiders can choke on your site if it has HTML errors. Use an HTML Validator religiously if you can. Also sign up in Feedburner so that others can subscribe to your articles. It’s probably a good idea to have one of those feedburner subscriber counters on your site or review your feeds every so often to ensure their validity. I got burned at one point when I did not realize my feeds were down and was the reason for Technorati stalling on my updates. Finally, add those cool new bookmarking widgets to your site to make it easy for readers to tag your posts or do the bookmarking/tagging yourself.
6. You are stuck in the Google sandbox.
   The Google sandbox is some vague, mysterious cloud where you find yourself when you are not indexed or are only partially indexed in Google (ok, it’s actually a filter or mechanism in the Google search process). This Google sandbox is as mythical as the Loch Ness Monster, being the source of speculation in the net as well as the cause of much hand wringing and gnashing of teeth by webmasters. Unfortunately, you have no control over how long you are stuck in this special place, so why not do the other traffic building steps that you do have control over, while you are waiting it out? You can also help out the process by submitting a sitemap to search engines that will allow for better indexing of your site.

This article: 3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic was what helped me the most — follow it to a T and watch your traffic explode. This mother-of-all-lists is from which I picked and chose what suggestions to follow. And what could be better than a one stop shop that discusses the subject further?

I’ll be sure to come up with my next installment on this popular subject.

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Categorized under: Web Marketing/Traffic, Web Publishing