How to Get More Traffic to Your Site

July 9, 2008 – 1:29 pm

This post is not about ‘how to get more traffic to your site’ its about how to get the right traffic to your site. Once a site is properly optimized some people will see reduced traffic to their site and that’s a good thing overall. The problem with targeting ‘more traffic’ as a goal can be the traffic is the wrong kind of traffic. If you sell widgets and get ranked #1 for ‘viagra’ then the traffic you get will land on your site, see it’s not what they want, and quickly move on - you’ve had a bounce (single page visit) which has eaten your bandwidth and produced no results.

So how do you get the right kind of traffic. First of you need to know what search phrases (keywords) to target. Generally we recommend Wordtracker (free trial), or Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Using these tools you can find terms that are likely to drive targeted traffic.

A good way to test the keywords you find is to set up a PPC campaign around these keywords and see what the traffic does once it lands on your site. If it bounces you’ve got the wrong traffic, if it stays or even converts you’ve got a winner. The budget outlay for this can be small - less than $100 should do it in most cases.

So now you have your search phrase list - around 10 for a non-ecommerce site should suffice, and for an ecommerce site you’ll want at least one search phrase per category and one per product which can run into thousands.

So with these 10 words you decide which are your top priority, either their higher traffic, or lower traffic but convert well. Then run the command ’site:mysite.com searchphrase’ on one of the engines and let the engines tell you which page is most relevant for the keyword. If the page that shows at #1 is in your opinion the best page that’s ok, if it isn’t you need to find the best page and then optimize it.

So optimization. Keyword density checks are old hat. Put your keyword once in the meta title, once in the meta description, once in the meta keywords. Make the headline (h1 tag) include your phrase, then try to insert your phrase about 6 times on the page. You can use Firefox to highlight your search term on your page using the command ‘Ctrl-F’, a search box appears in the lower right, type in your phrase, and click ‘highlight all’

Linking is then key and I’ll hit on that another time.