How to Increase Website Traffic on a Budget
So, I’ve purchased just about every book you could think of on increasing traffic to my website, but after carefully reading each and everyone of them, I realized that they really don’t tell you that much. They talk to you about spending money to hire SEO companies, creating a high to moderate budget to increase traffic, and link exchanging, but what they don’t tell you is that you can increase you traffic with a budget of ZERO, it just takes time.
I’ve found this out the hard way. Initially we were expecting people to flock to our blog, but when that wasn’t happening I had to dig deeper into all of my resources, i.e. the books I had already purchased and the Internet to find out what I was doing wrong. After studying this almost everyday, I began to make some changes to the way that I did some things. I changed how I did my post tags, how I listed my categories, how I titled my photos, I focused on the keywords that I used, I began to talk about things that most people were not talking about (unique content) and I analyzed my site through several different SEO checkers.
Before I realized that changes needed to be made to my blog, I had made certain that I had at least ten tags to each post, something that harms more than it does good. My categories consisted of names, something that wasn’t unique to my site. I never created titles for my images, I would use the title that was given to me which included random numbers and letters, HUGE mistake. I was also using keywords that were completely generic and not search engine specific. I also talked about the same things that everyone else was talking about ,something that you see often when visiting other blogs and websites and I had no idea that my website could be analyzed my robots.
My thought process behind creating ten plus post tags, often referred to as post keywords, was that the more I had the more likely it would be that someone would be searching for one of these and the more likely they would come to my site. So, I downloaded a plug-in that would automatically place tags on posts for me. The plug-in in would go through my post and created phrases and names that were important in search engines like Yahoo and Google. I was able to determine how many words were chosen based on each search engine, I chose seven words per search engine. This was a huge mistake. I submitted my site through a search engine that told me I had too many post keywords. I was thinking, “what a crock”, but I took it and ran with it. I began to go through my 2,000 plus keywords and reduced them to under 600. I took out keywords that like Miami, Dress, TV, things that had little to no significance to my blog. When I did this, I noticed that more traffic began to flow to my site almost immediately. People began to land on my tag pages, something that was not happening before. I’d never seen and entry page that include tags. This increased my traffic site, by a more than 50 visits per day. Remember 50 visits more a day is 50 visits more than I had yesterday and 50 visits that came to my site instead of my competitors. Read more