Generate Visitors from Web Content - The Effective Solution To Direct Traffic and Improved SEO / SERP's

We're tired of reading all the erroneous information circulating the web about link building and how throwing 30,000 spam links at your website is going to gain you favor with Google. We're also tired of reading all the misinformation about article marketing, article directory marketing, article syndication, article spinning etc etc etc.

We've road-tested various software products designed to supposedly ease the process of link building. These products are invariably designed to generate 'massive traffic' to your website via backlinks, yet they all fail in multiple different ways. But the type of failure they all share is the concept, the premise that throwing junk back links at a website is going to earn your site good SERP's.

We're also tired of all the 'junk', erroneous and downright misleading information which is circulating the various webmaster forums on article marketing. Most people do not really understand what article marketing is. They don't appreciate the difference between article syndication and article directory marketing. Many still believe that there's value from the back-links generated from having an article published in a directory and that the directory will be a huge source of direct traffic. Some even 'spin' their articles and submit multiple spun versions of the same content to multiple Article Directories.

if some of the above describes you, don't worry, you're not alone. But clearly you need some help. We can do this in one of a number of different ways.

1 - We can provide you with the facts behind the above marketing strategies and show you how to do things the right way, or

2 - We can do it for you.

If you beleive you have the in-house capability to implement an article marketing strategy which involves writing the content, formatting it for syndication, attracting syndicators, submitting direct to article directories, eZines and blog websites, generating backlinks to your own content to solidify it's status as 'original' content, then simply purchase our complete reference to article marketing and back-link building here.

If you prefer the hands-off approach, we can do all of the work for you with our service below.

The key points to our promotion service are -

A - we'll be building quality content on your website which is the one consistently required parameter throughout the history of SEO.

B - you'll receive quality votes from quality websites in the form of links back to your content pages

C - you'll receive syndication of your content - it will be placed on real niche websites who's visitors share a common interest, so you'll receive visits from real people who are interested in your products or services. This will increase your backlinks coming from themed sites and at the same time increase your base of non-search engine traffic thus helping to break your dependency on Google.

D - you'll receive back links, or 'link juice' from sites in your niche as well as the bigger high PR article directories and Web2.0 sites.

Reporting

- Submit detailed monthly report showing article websites submitted to.
- Submit 10 individual reports showing Web2.0 properties and backlinks. Each property will have login/password so you can visit and see the links.
- Submit screenshots for articles submitted for syndication and associated click traffic at the end of the month.
- Submit a ranking report showing target search terms. First initial report submitted after keyword list is agreed, with - subsequent reports at 7-10 day report intervals or as things change significantly.

Package Cost

$80 per article campaign.
Minimum 4 article campaigns per month

Terms

One month commitment required, then renewable at the same price. No contract, can be canceled any time.

Guarantee / Refund Policy

This is a labor intensive service and there are many factors affecting the outcome over which we have little or no control. We do not offer any placement guarantees and we do not offer full refunds on this service.

We use PayPal for fast and secure checkout. Use the 'Subscribe' button below. The service subscription price is $320 / mth

How to Get More Web Traffic

Your strategy for getting more web traffic will depend largely on -

A - Your Budget

B - Your skill level

C - Your industry (type of website)

D - Your time frame

Obviously a company with a large multi-thousand dollar marketing budget is going to approach traffic building strategies differently than a small company with more modest resources. This article is really geared towards smaller companies trying to develop web traffic on a shoestring budget.

Let's assume that for arguments sake you have fully built your website, have it hosted on a reliable host platform with a unique IP address, have covered basic on-page optimization steps, and you're ready to start marketing your 'finished' website. Let's also assume that you have a $500 initial budget and a $100 month ongoing budget and you do not have a particularly aggressive time frame for getting sales. In fact, lets state that with a budget in this region your traffic growth will more than likely be quite slow.

This will vary for everyone, but a possible approach to getting more web traffic on a modest budget could be as follows -

1. Create an Adwords account with Google and deposit $35.00 into your account. Using Google keywords tool, create a list of 25 of your search terms and setup bids avoiding the more generic and high cost search terms. Set a $35.00 monthly cap on your account so your spending is controlled and predictable. Install ad tracking so you can see how your investment with Google converts into sales or leads. Each month you'll need to sit down and asses your return on investment and decide if it's positive or not. You can switch off your spending after a couple months if you decide it isn't cost effective.
2. Do exactly the same thing at Yahoo Search Marketing. Create your account and use the same keyword phrases that you've setup with Google, and install Yahoo tracking to see how your clicks convert. After 2 months look at your Google and Yahoo results side by side and see what your true cost per click is on each, and what your real ROI is. You can then decide whether to keep both accounts active, close one, or close both. You may also decide to close one and transfer the budget from the closed account to the other open account. For example, you where spending $35 each month on each account ($70 total) and you found that Yahoo has a better conversion rate so you closed Google and increased your spend with Yahoo to $70/mth
3. Take $200.00 from your budget and use it to pay for an incoming link building service. Research the subject and look for those companies with real testimonials and who offer full reporting on where your links will be placed. Ensure that they place links only on sites from compatible industries and target at least a few high PR websites. Try to speak with a person before paying anything and be sure that they never post links on gaming/gambling sites etc.
4. Take $75 from your budget and find several industry website directories and pay to add your link into their database. Make sure that they use real links and not javascript links that won't create any link juice for you. Write different descriptions based around your primary keywords for each directory, so they don't look too canned.
5. If your website is regional, or if you think you can benefit from local traffic, join your local area Chamber of Commerce and pay for a website listing. These sites often command higher PR's and do well on local searches. You should expect to pay around $125 for a local directory listing, and will need to renew it each year. You could divide this by 12 in some instances and pay monthly or quarterly if you prefer.

At this point your $500 budget looks like so

$35 Google + $35 Yahoo + $200 link building + $75 directories + $125 Chamber = $470

So you're pretty much at your limit for the first round of investment but you can start to think about your next month strategy which should be split between some PPC ads on Google Yahoo and continued link building.

If you've found, as many people do, that the ROI from PPC is negative and you prefer to drop that expenditure entirely, then use some of the money to have articles written for your website. You should obviously be the primary source for written content, since you know your industry best, but sometimes the writing just dries up and it's OK to pay a company $25 or so to create a press release or article for your business. Make sure that any new content of this nature appears on your website first, then once you see it indexed by Google, you can add links into the article and submit it elsewhere. If you become more proficient at article writing and can turn them out at a good rate, you can reserve some unique first-time content for the better rated directory/article websites.

You can also spend some of your monthly budget on Press release distribution, as a means to building more web traffic. You won't gain a lot from this but it will help directly and indirectly.

After 3 months or so you should hopefully be able to increase your marketing budget and start to develop into other area's of marketing, perhaps some higher-level SEO or intensified link building campaigns.

If you haven't already, you might think about adding a blog or forum to your website, but think carefully about the format before you make the commitment. If your website gets very little traffic then a forum might create the wrong impression since there will be too few members and too few posts, and you'll look like one of the many abandoned websites out there. If your site has low traffic stats you can still create a blog and write more announcements about your trade/businesses which do not read as though they're trying to solicit a response from people. As your traffic builds you can change your writing style to encourage more visitor interaction. Bottom line is that a blog or a forum is a great way to build content and traffic, as are articles and reviews.

Here's a link to a website which receives around 800 visitors per day and has never spent a penny on marketing www.newaudiosociety.com They get all their traffic via an article/review database and an extensive forum. The forum alone raises the indexed page count from less than 100 to almost 2000 pages on the sitemap. There's a 'who's online' box on the homepage that shows typically from 15 - 75 visitors online at any one part of the day, and that number excludes traffic into the forum!

Continued from this page

Marketing a new website - considerations and advice pt II

So we were talking about DIY SEO versus DIFM SEO and covered the basic tools and skills needed to perform your own SEO at a rudimentary level.

Given that the theme of this article is really understanding what work is involved and how to prioritize it, we should talk about the basics of on-page SEO versus off-site SEO.

Let's be clear on this. On page SEO is performing optimization tasks on your actual web pages. Things like adding Meta tags, Heading tags etc, are all on-page optimization tasks.

Off-site SEO is basically the task of developing incoming links to your website. Which is most important? - That's fairly easy, off-site SEO will have a bigger impact on your rankings than anything you can do on your actual website. Of course this assumes that you have the basics in place on your website, like sufficient textual content, basic optimization techniques in place etc. Off-site SEO has an effectiveness rating of around 70%. That means that 70% of the influence on your rankings/positions in search engines like Google will come from what you do away from your website, and only 30% by the actual website itself.

Looking at off-site elements and primarily link-building, it basically comes under the following hierarchy, (all important but least important first) -

1. Any incoming link to your website from another website
2. An incoming link to your website with relevant link anchor text.
3. Any incoming link to your website from a higher PR rated website
4. An incoming link to your website from a higher PR rated website with relevant anchor text.

If the website pointing to you is also of a similar theme to yours then that will help too.

So as soon as you get your website live, and have taken the basic on-page steps for SE optimization, you need to start developing incoming links.

There are a few do's and don'ts to consider -

Avoid spammy sites that are completely off-topic. Casino websites, via**a sites and the usual junk.

Start out with directories, it's OK to occasionally pay for links but don't overdo it.

Mix up the link texts so they don't all look the same*

Reciprocal links are OK when it's requested, but one-way links have more value

Look for higher profile websites with good traffic and a good Google Page Rank

Keep working at it. Set a routine so you add a new link or two daily, and keep at it even when you feel that you're running out of places to go!

*Just a quick explanation on different link types -

This website is related primarily to Joomla Web Design Services. That search term is one of our most relevant. Having a link coming into us, as in #1 above might be like this -

Visit www.webdesigndoorcounty.com for Joomla web design services.

But having the keywords in the anchor link text would look like this -

Joomla Web Design Services

The latter would carry more juice, but remember to mix it up a little so it doesn't always read the same way. Remember that you can also link into a specific page with link anchor text relevant to the content of the page.

More on link building

Most people are confused at the importance of off-site SEO. How can what I do away from my website have more influence than what I do on my website? In basic terms, Google struggled in the early years trying to combat website owners who adopted all manner of techniques on their websites to try and improve page rankings. Then the brains at Google caught onto the simple idea that when people link to you, they are essentially casting a vote for you, pretty much like a recommendation. So they use this system heavily to rank websites, the more links, the more votes and the higher ranking. Of course as these things evolve, people find ways to manipulate the system, such as buying links in large volume. This is why we suggest that you do not focus your link building campaign on purchased links, Google is wise to this strategy and will penalize your efforts.

Marketing a New Website

If you've just launched a new website you are hopefully prepared for the marketing effort that will be necessary to build traffic and sales. Oddly enough we still encounter people who were 'sold' a website and had little or no understanding that the actual design of a website is only step one of a long Internet campaign. And yes, many people come to realize this the hard way and simply quit, after spending $100's often $1000's on the design stage.

At Connect Online Svcs the thing that we work on the hardest at the pre-contract stage is making sure the prospective customer has a clear understanding of what to expect. In most cases this is easy, people nowadays generally come along with some knowledge of how things work, but occasionally we see newbies looking to get online for the first time, and it's imperative that we coach them in the early stages and ensure they know exactly what they're getting into.

Here are a few words of wisdom for people in the early stages of planning a website, not necessarily in any order of importance -

Sandbox and domain aging affect

This is a simple enough concept but it's important to understand what this means. In simple terms, Google will look at any new website and determine how old the domain name is, or how long it has been in use. Aged domains are processed without impediment to ranking, whereas new domains can often see a short-term boost in rankings, followed by a drop then a longish wait in the sandbox. The principal is under some debate but most people consider it a way of filtering people/businesses looking to make a quick kill online, those who haven't really shown any longer term commitment. There are also websites/businesses that try to jump on new trends/ideas as soon as they're released, and sandboxing their domain will result in fewer fly-by-night operations and more stable companies along for the long haul.

So expect to spend time in the SB with any new website, it can be 3-6 months before your rankings start to improve.

Where best to put my marketing effort?

This is a great question that we get asked from time to time. The short answer is really to diversify and cover as many areas as possible. But what if time is critical and you're looking for ways to prioritize your marketing efforts?

A quick way to get traffic, and we've talked about this elsewhere, is through PPC - Pay-Per-Click marketing. For those who don't already know, this is a system operated by Google and Yahoo whereby you -

• Create an account (with either Google, Yahoo or both...and there are a couple others, maybe even some that are specific to your industry)
• Research and form a list of keywords and keyword phrases pertaining to your products/services (both Google/Yahoo provide research tools)
• Write Taglines and descriptions for each of your chosen keywords
• Set a bid amount for each keyword/phrase, which is basically the amount you are willing to pay each time Google/Yahoo send a visitor to your web page.

The amount you pay per click will determine where you rank against your competitors, who may also be bidding on the same keywords. For example, this website www.thenaturalshopper.com sells products with 'royal jelly' amongst other things. Lets say that there are other companies bidding on the search term 'royal jelly' and company A appears in position #1 for the search term and Company B appears in position #2. For The Natural Shopper to appear in #2, they would need to bid an amount higher than Company B, who would then be pushed down to position #3, and lower than Company A, who would remain at the number one position. That's the basic principal. They key is to managing your campaign so that you are getting a positive ROI (return on investment). If your bid amounts are so high that you spend more on marketing than you achieve on sales, then that may not be the right thing for you. If your website is within an industry that has a good repeat order rate, then it maybe OK to loose a little on the first order, since you'll get the repeat order essentially for zero marketing effort, with a net gain over the two orders.

If you find that the ROI isn't working for you with PPC, then before you abandon this strategy make sure that you've researched keywords that are less competitive and therefor cheaper to bid against. They may yield lower traffic, but as long as they convert, and you maintain a positive ROI, then they're going to be good value for money. Here is a more detailed look at how to get more traffic on a budget

So you'll need to experiment with PPC and see if it's right for you.

Much of how you approach marketing your website will be determined by whether you choose the DIY or DIFM (do it for me) route. If you have some basic skills on the web there's no reason why you can't adopt the DIY approach. Let's look briefly at the skills and tools needed. Assuming your website was produced with a combination of HTML and CSS, you're going to need some form of HTML editor to make the necessary edits to your code. You won't be doing anything complicated, just locating the lines of code known as Meta tags and editing the Title, Description, Keywords tags and perhaps one or two more. Then you'll be adding ALT tags to images and Heading tags to page texts. So it's mostly basic and you can get away with a free HTML editor in most cases.Then you'll need some way of loading modified files back to the website, either via your HTML editor (like Dreamweaver) an FTP software like CuteFTP or through the hosting control panel.

If your website was created in a CMS like Joomla or Drupal, you'll need to learn the basics of working with Meta tags within your CMS. If your designer didn't do this already, you'll want to install the SEF module in Joomla, which can be a little tricky depending on how your website is hosted.

So by acquiring the basic tools and skills necessary, and by researching the topic from reliable SEO websites, you can affect most changes and basic optimization tasks quite easily yourself.

PART II