One of the most frequent questions I am asked is “Will your ebook teach me how to get more traffic to my web site?” Lots of people have written books — and series of books — on generating traffic. The focus of this ebook is to show you how to maximize the traffic that you already have. And while tips
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for building pages through forums and free content are excellent ideas, they are no replacement for a solid course on how to get more people to visit your site. Because this question is 50 common though, I will address it briefly in this chapter. III give you the basics, describe some unusual ideas that some people are using and telI you where you can get ail the information you need.
In the next chapter, you’ll also find a quick run-through of search engine o pt i m i za t ion.
20.1 Advertising
Lets start with the obvious: buying advertising. We’ve already talked about AdWords/AdSense arbitrage but exactly the same principle applies to buying your traffic from other sources too.
For example, the minimum price for advertising at Overture is ten cents per click and you must spend at least $20 each month. If you can see that the ads being served on your site are generating less than ten cents per click then you’re neyer going to make a profit.
Exactly the same is true of any other pay-per-click advertising campaign.
One of the advantages of following your AdSense stats is that you can estimate how much the clicks on your ads are worth. That can telI you how much you can afford to pay for clicks from other sites when you buy advertising.
It might well pay to advertise, but before you buy make sure it pays a profit.
20.2 Reciprocal Linking
Many people focus on lin king in order to improve their search engine rankings. That’s important but don’t forget that the links themselves can be one of your biggest sources of traffic!
Probably the easiest way to invite links (apart from searching out related sites and writing to each one) is to add a “link” section to your pages where webmasters can choose a banner, button or text link to place on their site. On the same page, they can also submit their own site for linking. That should help you swap links without being swamped by sites looking for free placement.
The most critical factor when requesting a link though is where the site places it. Links on the home page always do better than a link buried on one
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of the internai pages and a good banner or graphic iink on a site with content reiated to yours wiii usuaiiy get more ciicks than a text iink.
if you find that your iinks aren’t appearing on the pages you want, there are a cou pie of simpie remedies that you can use.
The first is to ask for a better position! if you have a good reiationship with the webmaster or if it’s a smaii site, there’s a good chance that they’ii agree. it certainiy won’t hurt to ask.
Not everyone is 50 generous though, and another option is to offer something in return. A iink in a simiiar position on your own site can make a good deai if your sites are of simiiar size but you can aiso offer content or even a speciai page for that sites users.
if you have a site about furniture for exampie, and you want a iink at a top directory for home furnishings then you couid create a speciai weicome page for users of that site to draw them deeper into yours and deiiver targeted ads. You might even want to go as far as creating a sort of co-branded version of your site for their users to ciick into. As iong as you’re getting paid when the users ciick on the ads, what do you care whose design they’re iooking at?
20.3 SendAFriend
There’s nothing iike virai marketing to promote your site! it’s free, it comes with trusted recommendations and it gives you great CTR.
Each of your content pages shouid have a iink marked “Send a friend” which opens a form 50 that the user can send your URL onwards. Untii Googie aiiows ads in emaii, there’s iittie point in AdSense mem bers sending actuai content but there’s no reason why you (or your users) can’t send iinks to pages with ads.
20.4 RSS Feeds
One of the chaiienges of keeping your user base is that readers can be pretty forgetfui. Adding an RSS feed to your site is a great way to iet peopie know that a new post has gone up and that they shouid stop by and take a iook
You’ii want to make sure that your headiines are attractive and inviting. Many users don’t iook past them, SO if they don’t do the job, the post won’t be opened or read, and the user won’t ciick to your site. images can aiso heip your feeds to stand out.
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lt’s rarely a good idea to send more than RSS post to a subscriber each day. The mest cemmen reason that users unsubscribe isn’t poor content or too much advertising, but toc many pests.
One geed strategy then is te divide your RSS feeds by theme and let subscribers enly receive pests en the tepics that interest them mest. If you’re writing about a range of different themes, that sheuld already help te keep the deliveries dewn te a manageable level.
The only other choice you’ll have to make is whether to include the whole pest in yeur feed or just a teaser te bring people te yeur site. When the goal cf the feed is te get people back te yeur site te click the ads, yeu might think that there’s little point in giving them the whole article in their feed reader. But readers will often unsubscribe if they can’t see the whole article. That weuld reduce yeur subscriber base. Yeu might be better off giving them the whele article and inviting them back te yeur site te add and see cemments. Test beth options and see which werks best fer yeu.
20.5 Offline Marketing
One cf the biggest mistakes that people make when they build an Internet business is to forget that there’s a world outside the Internet! Just because you make money out of traffic doesn’t mean you have to source ail of that traffic enline.
Yeu sheuld make sure that yeur URL is listed en ail cf yeur marketing material: yeur business cards, Yellew Pages ads, flyers, envelepes, freebies and just about anything else yeu can think cf.
Yeu sheuld certainly have yeur site address in yeur email signatures.
20.6 Promoting Your BIog
Ive talked quite a bit about blogging in this bock, mestly because I knew from experience that it’s possible to make a very nice income from a good blog but also because a lot of people aren’t making the most of the blogs they have.
If you’ve got AdSense on your blog, there’s a whole range cf different things that yeu can easily de te increase yeur traffic and earn extra cash.
The first thing yeu sheuld de is make sure that yeur bleg is set te ping rpc.pingematic.cem as seon as you’ve updated. Pingomatic.com offers a free
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ali-in-one pinging service that covers ail the large blog directories and search engines. On Blogger.com, you can find this in your settings; other blog tools, such as Movable Type and Wordpress have a similar option.
You should also set up an RSS feed to let people know when you update. Apart from the fact that you can now place ads on your feeds, it will also keep your regular users coming back to see more ads (and to see your latest posts).
I nstead 0f linking to the previous month’s or the previous week’s posts, each page should also have its own link. Sounds obvious, right? And yet how many blogs have you seen with one link to about twenty different entries? One link per entry means more pages for ads, better links from external sites and higher search engine rankings.
You should certainly comment on other people’s blogs, especially those that write about the same sort of things as your site, but ultimately the best way to get traffic to your blog is to make it good. If your writing is dulI or difficult to read, it doesn’t matter how hard you push it, no one will want to read it — and those who do stay won’t stick around to click the ads.
20.7 Public Relations And Publicity
Just about ail of the methods that you use to bring people to your site will cost you money. You’ll have to pay for ads on other sites, you’ll have to give up valuable real estate on your site to lists of links and you’ll have to decide how much you want to pay for an AdWords campaign or to get yourself promoted through Overture.
Publicity can be free.
It doesn’t have to be of course. You can pay a PR expert to publicize your site for you and place articles in the press on your behalf... but it’s not necessary and they can be too expensive for most sites, especially at the beginning.
Or you can simply create a good quality press release yourself, fax it out to the media and wait for reporters to calI.
Sound difficult?
It really isn’t. A press release is just one page and will take between twenty and forty minutes to write.
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There are a number of rules you have to follow: you need a gripping headiine; you have to include a quote; and you have to be available for the interview to narne just three. Most irnportantly though you have to have a story the press wants to run.
Telling them that you’ve just launched a new site isn’t going to cut it. Telling them that your new site is going to set a new trend or change some people’s lives just rnight.
Think about the effect that your piece of “news” wiII have on the public and you’ve got the beginnings of a great story.
And what do you get in return for doing that? Well, not only do you get the narne of your business in the press, you also get the halo that cornes with it. When you’re in the media, people assume that you’re an expert. You becorne the nurnber one source for whatever your website offers.
And to underline that fact, you can even put a button on your horne page that says something like: “As Seen On CNN!”
Sound good?
The real expert on rnarketing through free publicity is Paul Hartunian. This is the guy who bought a hunk of wood that had been cut frorn the Brooklyn Bridge during renovations, cut it into one-inch cubes and wrote a press release with the headline “New Jersey Man SelIs Brooklyn Bridge For
$19.95”.
He was on CNN for two days and the story was run as far away as Peru.
He now lives on a 30-acre estate and teaches people how to use publicity for
their businesses. You can order his publicity kit at www.hartunian.corn.
20.8 Learn From A Pro
Do you know John Reese? If not, you probably haven’t spent much time in Internet rnarketing circles. John is the leading guru for teaching people how to get rnore traffic to their web site(s). He leads special rnulti-day serninars to srnall groups, charging up to $5000/person to attend. And you know what? His students walk away feeling that they got a BARGAI N!
John has now rnade his rnarketing course available to the general public at a FRACTION of the cost. lt’s full of DVDs, audio CDs, textbooks, workbooks and tip sheets to help you build a cornprehensive Internet rnarketing strategy.
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I own a CO 0f John’s Traffic Secrets and am pleased to give it my very personal endorsement. While I could attempt to teach you everything I know about Internet marketing, there is no point in attempting to reinvent the wheel. Everything you need to know is in this is course, and the investment is very minor for people who intend to build a successful Internet business that wiII Iast.
If you want to read more about John’s Traffic Secrets course, click the Iink below.
TrafficSecrets.com
21. Search Engine Optimization
In the previous chapter, I talked about a number of different ways that you can increase your traffic. Probably the most important method though is to get a high ranking on search engines. That’s free traffic.
Again, there are ail sorts of books and experts who can help you improve your SEC and win a top spot for a site. I have had experience with a number of strategies that could help you improve your ranking. I’d like to share them with you now.
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pict21.jpg
21.1 Robot.txt
The first thing you need to know about indexing your site at search engines is that you control which pages are indexed and which are excluded. You do that with a file called robots.txt.
Robots.txt contains nothing more than a record of which robots should index which pages.
Without going into too much detail, there are two conventions used in a robots.txt file:
User-agent: [Defines which robots the site is addressing.]
Disallow: [Allows you to list the sites or robots you want to exclu de.]
In general, you’re probably going to use “User-agent: *“ to make sure that you’re addressing the robots of every search engine and you’ll probably want include ail of your pages (although you might want to exclude your directories: “Disallow: !cgi-bin!”).
Robots.txt just allows you to control which robots index which pages. lt’s important to have in your directory but it won’t really increase your search engine rankings.
Titles, URL’s and links are much more important.
21.2 Titles And URLs
I mentioned earlier that Metatags just aren’t what they used to be. I also said that it’s important that your titles and URLs contain the most important keywords for each of your pages in order to keep the ads relevant.
But those titles and URLs don’t just influence your ads; they also affect your search engine rankings.
A page about toy cars called cars.html might have a low ranking when someone looks for information about cars. Change the name to toy_cars.html and you should get a much higher ranking when someone looks for “toy cars”.
The more relevant your URL is and the easier it is to read, the better. www.domain.com/page is always an improvement than
http:!/domain.com!page.php?newsid= 1234583373. That’s why on my website www.familyfirst.com, I use URL’s like
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www.famiIyfirst.com/miss_abigaiIs_time_warp.htmI rather than strings cf num ber which confuse the robots.
One cf the first places you should look when you want to improve your rankings then is your titles and URLs.
21.3 Links
The more links you have, the better. And the better the sites that list those links the more they’ll be worth. It is always worth aiming to put your links on sites that look good and have high rankings. In fact, being listed on a poor site can bring your ranking down.
One of the best places to place Iinks to improve your search engine rankings is on forums. This isn’t an exchange; you post your links on their site, they don’t post their links on yours.
Make sure you browse forums regularly, add comments and include your URL in your signature. You’re likely to get the best results on good forums related to your topic but dont be fussy. Even unrelated forums can help to improve your search engine ranking.
Google’s spiders love forums and review them every week. And because these sites tend have quite high ranking, those posts will do wonders for your listings.
0f course, you shouldn’t ignore the SEO forums themselves for some good tips. www.searchengineforums.com is one good place to browse and http://forums.seochat.com is another. You should also check out my own forum www.AdSenseChat.com. Although this is mostly about AdSense optimization, not surprisingly, SEC issues are discussed often, especially as they relate to AdSense. lt’s a great source to dig up new ideas.
And if you’re going to putting your links ail over the forums, why flot do the same thing for blogs?
You can think of blogs as places to read som eone’s writings if you like, but don’t forget they also let you add your own feedback. That means that as an AdSense publisher, you should also be thinking of them as free places to post your links. Again, any blog is good but top blogs on your topic are probably the best.
Don’t forget to check out the SEO blogs too. wwwseobookcom is a good one, www.bradfallon.com is another and of course there’s my own blog at wwwjoelcommcom. You’re welcome to leave your links there!
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lt’s not just blogs and forum that that let you leave your details though. There are plenty of sites that welcome free content and would be happy to display your Iink if it means that they get an article in return. Start by looking at other sites on your topic and then try
www.ezinearticles.com. You don’t even need to write anything original when you do this. If you write a new entry to your blog, submit it to an article site at the same time as you upload it to your blog. Who knows where your links will end up?
The easiest way to put your links across the Web though is to do a link exchange. If you’ve got friends who have websites, start there. That’s very easy.
While linking from friends’ sites is straightforward and cost-free, www.linkmetro.com makes the whole Iink exchange process very formai. There’s a giant range of different sites that you can exchange links with 50 you can keep your links relevant and your ranking good and high.
You can also buy links on sites like www.Adzaar.com, www.AdBrite.com, and www.LinkAdage.com. Again, these allow you to choose sites on which you can place your own links but charge a fee for the process.
On my own site www.buyjoeldessert.com, for exam pie, I give page links to people who satisfy my sweet tooth with a donation to my cause. (1m still hungry by the way, 50 feel free to sign up, improve your rankings and make my dentist happy!)
Select and click the button below once.
3 Musketeers Bars $2.00 Love that chewy nougat Chocolate Chip Cookies
Homemade are best $3.00 D
Ads bv Gooaoooqle
Sponsors
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Hot Fude Sundae
With whippecl cream, yum $5.00 fl
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• steve btshop
• Free Trpt Readincis
• WhiDlash 1niur
• Rowenas GoUrmet Cakes
• Rent 2 Own Homes
• TheZenofThin
• Perfumenut .com
• Couoon Codes Onhne
• Oavids Deal
• Asbestos Rernopal
• Billiofluepe
• Rorne Wallace
• Fractienal Ownershio
• Windows Reoistrv deaner
Chocolate Cake
Gotta have a whole cake $10.00 D
Fed By:
Rowenas Double Delicious Chocolate Cake $25.00 E
Or Define Vour Dessert:
• Scott Hildenbrand
• Rluearass Basset Rescue
• KoIIey K
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• aood eats
• Angeia Roberts
• Sieve Greerr
• Debra Sawvers
• Keith Woolley
• Bambini Kids
• CaroTana
• The Sam Fredom Phenornenon
• Km Sn, der
• Terr StockdaI
• 5ar Na
Feed Joel Comrn’ I
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Fig. 21.1 Links for sale on BuyJoelDessert.com.
I know of several associates who have done something similar, allowing their visitors a tangible way f0 say “thank you” for their online efforts. Smart site owners see opportunity in this strategy as you can acquire quality links rather inexpensively. Here are some additional examples:
www.buyleoalatte.com
www.buybarbaracoffee.com
You can actually acquire the “Buy Me A Drink” script that ail these sites run
on. Click here!
And finally, one resource that I highly recommend is WebRing
(www.webring.com). This is such an easy way to gather links on relevant sites that I can’t believe ifs not the talk of the net.
The idea is to link together sites on similar topics 50 that users can quickly find topics that they’re interested in. Nice for them. But ifs nicer for you when a bunch of links from similar sites rocket your SEO ranking. That’s exactly what Google and other search engines are looking for when they rank sites.
That makes WebRing a hugely powerful tool.
WebRing: We Bring the Internet
WebRing News
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175
Fig. 21.2 WebRing makes Iinking easy
21.4 Create Gateways
Usually, your Iinks wiII Iead directly to your home page. That’s where you see your site as starting and that’s where you want them to enter.
But if the content the user wants to see is on one of the internai pages, there’s no reason for them to have to ciick around to find it. Fui that page with keywords that reiate to the content on that page and it wiii have its own search engine ranking — and weii-targeted ads.
So if you have a site about cats and one of your pages was about cat food, it wouid make sense to put pienty of cat food keywords on the page. That wouid get you cat food ads and a high ranking on search engines when someone does a search for “cat food” rather than just peopie who wanted to know about “cats.”
21.5 Automatic Submissions
Submitting your site to au of the search engines from Googie and Yahoo! right down to the smaiiest ones, and optimizing each of your pages for high ranking can be a drag. You aiso have to keep submitting the site on a reguiar basis and constantiy check your position if you want to keep it.
The search engines are aiways re-indexing and reorganizing. A site that can be in the top spot one week can be a coupie of pages over a week iater. (Good news if you’re iow down, not 50 good if you’ve spent hours changing your pages to ciimb the rankings.)
That’s why many webmasters simpiy outsource their SEO 50 that they can con centrate on content.
There are iots of companies that do this. Search Engine Biaster for exam pie, iets you choose from over 600,000 engines but there are pienty of others.
Personaiiy, i think that’s a bit of a waste of time. Oniy Googie, Yahoo and MSN are important, in that order.
21.6 SEOTools
There are a number of toois that i recommend to heip with search engine optimization. The first is the Googie Tooibar, which wiii iet you keep track of
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your page ranking. You can download it for free at http://toolbar.poocile.com/poocilebar.htm I.
- Googlebar IJ
Fig. 19.2 The Google Toolbar: Pretty and useful too.
.4’
The Alexa toolbar is also useful and will show you how your site ranks against others. You can download the Alexa toolbar at
http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/guicktour.html
nie yiew rvoris IouT nip
Se.rch - Favohtes Media -C
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Fig. 21.3 The Alexa Toolbar: Is your site number one yet?
In short, you can find out exactly how your competitors have got to the top of the search engines, learn what they did — and do the exact same thing to swipe their spot.
You can learn more about SEC Elite and pick up your copy from www.adsense-secrets.com/seoelite.html
Reciprocal Manager
Reciprocal Manager takes much of the headache out of
managing your links. As you continue to optimize your
site, you will find yourself winning yourself more links
on other sites and being asked to host links from other
site. Reciprocal Manager creates a professional-looking,
neatly organized links directory that’s good for both ;1
—;0]
SEO Elite
SEC Elite is a really excellent tool for learning from your most successful
competitors. You can discover the optimum number
___________ of times to repeat keywords, where you should put
them, whether or not to use hi and h2 tags and even your competitors’ link strategies, and a huge amount more.
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pict22.jpg
your link partn ers and your visitors.
The program also lets you offer sites the option of placing their links on more than one site at the same time and, most importantly, to search for other sites to link to based on search word or phrase.
Learn more about Reciprocal Manager at http://www.reciprocalmanager.com.
Stomping The Search Engines
Finally, Brad Fallon is one of the biggest experts when it comes to SEC optimization. His wedding favors site grossed over $1 ,000,000 within a short time of launching, mainly due to his ability to get his site prime
placement in Google and the other search engines.
jlfr#J l’ve met Brad and chatted to him about his SEO optimization and I can telI you, he knows his stuff! I
thought I knew a bunch about SEC, but after spending a couple of h ours with Brad, I feel like a novice.
You can have thousands of web pages, but without a great search engine optimization plan, you many not be making the money you want to with AdSense. I HlGHLYrecommend picking up Brad Fallon’s 10 audio CD series, Stomping the Search Engines. It is over 8 hours of Brad’s teaching on how to duplicate his success for your web site(s).
I own the set and have begun listening to it. It is truly FULL of incredible material that you will find very useful to helping you reach your goals.
To read more about Stomping the Search Engines and acquire your own copy, click this link: http://www.adsense-secrets.com/seoexpert.html.
21.7 A Word About Cloaking
Cne issue that surfaced recently in the contextualized advertising world is “cloaking”: presenting a different site to the Google bot than the one you present to users.
There can be good reasons for doing this. If you’ve got a forum for example, the bot could read ail the information on your page related to forums, links and the design etc., find that it outweighs your forum content and serve you ads related to forums in general instead of your site in particular.
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pict23.jpg
You could also find that your search engine listings are affected toc: instead cf appearing nice and high on the results page following a search for your topic, you might only appear to people looking for forums. That’s not likely to win you rnuch traffic.
One solution is to strip the site down using javascript or one cf the tools available online 50 that when the Google bot cornes, it only reads the content.
0f course, you could also fool the bot into thinking that your site is about... well, anything really. You could sparn Google into showing your site to anyone who was searching for anything.
And that’s why Google banned the practice altogether.
Any form of cloaking, whether it’s to get better targeted ads, improve your search engine rankings... or spam the search engines isa breach of Google’s T0S and could get you banned.
So what should you do if you find that your design has a bigger influence on your ads and ranking than your content?
The best — and sirnplest thing to do — is to rnake sure that the description and keyword rneta tags are ail filled in properly with terrns relevant to your content.
Section Targeting can de-ernphasize problernatic areas cf your website and might well affect your search engine rankings (it’s certainly worth a try).
And if these don’t solve your problem, you might want to think of a redesign.
21.8 TrafficAndConversion.com
I said at the beginning cf this chapter that this bock is about AdSense and not about SEO rankings. That’s because I know much more about AdSense than I do about search engine optirnization.
We ail have our strong points and AdSense is rnine.
If you’re looking for someone whose strong point is search engine optirnization though, I recornrnend Mark Widawer at
www.trafficandconversion .corn.
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Many of the ideas in this chapter came as a resuit cf me raiding his brain for some great strategies. If you’re looking for more of the same, you should definitely check out his site and see what he has to say.
You won’t regret it.
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