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.
I also began to study websites that I was competing with and compare them to mine. I noticed that many of my competitors used unique categories, so I began to look at their site statistics to see just how their traffic was entering their website and I saw that people were entering through their unique categories, but no one had enter through mine. I began to change my categories, instead of using the names of celebrities and places, I began to use broader terms that would cover a wide array of topics, for example, Fabulous in Film, would cover any actress or actor. I began to see traffic trickle in, maybe one or two visits a day, but it was one to two visits more than I had the day before.
I also noticed that people were visiting my competitors site via images, so I sought to find out why. When I looked at it I realized that, their images had specific names, an example of this would be ‘Beyonce at the Eiffel Tower’ instead of 48jfu575kfk. I also realized that there was a section when I uploaded my images that said alt text, I began to research what alt text was. I found out that the alt text in an image is how search engines decide what the image contains, so I began to name my image specifically and use that name as the alt text as well. By doing this, my images began to skyrocket in google images. Many of them to number one. This brings great traffic to my site, but one thing you have to realize is that traffic from google images does not come the same day or even week you post them to your site. Many times the traffic comes a month or two after the image has already been on your site, but I’ve received between five and ten thousand visits from single images over a months time.
While studying my competition, I also took note of the keywords, or meta tags, they were using for their site. You can easily determine this by viewing the source of their website. In Internet Explorer, you can do this by going to View – Source in the task bar, look for meta name “keywords”. I determined that my keywords we silly. I was simply using the names of celebrities, which in itself isn’t bad, but I may only talk about that person once. I began to use meta tags that were common to my blog. I also added meta tags that I knew people would search for. This helped me to improve my SEO ranking tremendously, bringing my score up more than 15 percent and that’s a great thing. You may not directly see evidence of this, but you will see and increase in the number of hits you get simply because your posts will began to rank higher on search engines.
I then remember that I kept reading about unique content, I kept thinking, if I’m writing about celebrities, how can my content be unique??? Then I had the bright idea to include those celebrities that most people dismissed. So I began to talk about small time actors and actress that are not in mainstream media, celebrities that you and I both would know by face, but not as much by name. People are still searching for these people and they want to know what they are up too. This helped me out as well, because when people searched for those celebrities, my posts would be on the first page of their search engine as few bloggers mentioned them. I’ve received thousands of hits on little known celebrities. This also helps when these celebrities began to gain notoriety.
I’ve mentioned several times already that I’ve analyzed my site. There are tons of SEO checkers and website analyzers that you can find by searching google. My advice would be to use as many of them as you can because each one of them will give you bits of information that will help you with your SEO optimization.
Hopefully you’ve noticed that all of the tactics that I’ve used are free. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to increase traffic, especially if you don’t have it. I’ve even found that using advertising like Google AdWords helps, but very little. Many of the people that come from ads fail to return, giving you little or no return on your investment.
If you take one thing away from this post, let it be that time and patience goes a long way. If you don’t see and increase in traffic tomorrow, DON’T GIVE UP. If you give up, you will never see and increase, but if you stick with your site and constantly post to your site, your hard work will pay off.
Visit my site pointemout.com to take a look at some of these tactics at work.
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One Comment on How to Increase Website Traffic on a Budget
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Jeff on
Sat, 22nd May 2010 2:49 pm
Great advice, and you’re absolutely right! Most people ignore the concept of “unique content”. Without it, you’re just another face in the crowd to a search engine. I’ve also been working on some search engine optimization tips myself. Check out my blog if you get a chance. Let me know what you think:
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