by Joao Moraes on June 1, 2009
7 Simple Ways To Build Traffic To A New Website
By Mike Tekula (c) 2008
Got a brand new website? That’s great, but nobody cares.
OK, maybe that’s a little harsh. The truth, however, is that just having a website doesn’t get you much.
Editor’s Note: Publication of the SiteProNews newsletter will be intermittent during the next 2 weeks. Visit SiteProNews.com for the latest articles, webmaster news and blog posts. We wish all of our loyal readers a happy holiday season.
Many business owners I meet are surprised to find, once we look at the numbers, that the shiny new site they had built not too long ago gets little to no traffic on a daily basis.
Many newcomers to the web make the mistake of thinking that just by buying a domain name and putting up your site, visitors are going to happen by - something like when you buy property and build a storefront in a busy part of town.
It just doesn’t work that way. The web is harsh. You can have the best looking site in the world with great resources and content and go entirely ignored or unnoticed. It happens. It’s happening right now. Somewhere out there in the ether is a brand new gorgeous website loaded with great content, and nobody cares. Poor little lonely site.
But there is hope. Every website had its early days. Even sites that get hundreds of thousands of visitors a day started out with none.
Here are 7 simple things you can start doing right now to help drive traffic to your site.
- Get Some Quick Links From Trusted Directories
Link building is a long-term process with long-term goals, but for brand new sites with no history you’ve got to start somewhere. There are a number of directories out there that provide free and paid listings (subject to editorial review, of course). Here are the ones I recommend:
- Yahoo!
- Business.com
- JoeAnt.com
- DMOZ.org
- BOTW.org
- there’s a great list of directories sorted by SEOmoz’s Trifecta score - bookmark it and get started
- Start Blogging
OK, blogging isn’t for everybody (especially you boring people), but it’s a great way to build relevant content at your site on a consistent basis. It also gives your visitors/ customers a way to engage with you. But please don’t make the mistake of being too “corporate” on your blog - do yourself a favor and check your Public Relations cap at the door. Don’t be afraid to discuss your mistakes, missteps you’ve made, and what you’ve learned from them as well as your triumphs. In short, be a human, not a brand.
- Consider Paid Search
For new websites, the day when you receive all the traffic you need for free from search engines and other referrals is a long way off - if not just a pipe dream altogether. Often times paid search campaigns are a great way to get your site in front of your target market today. Be sure to keep your budget modest, though, until you’re confident in your ROI. Be sure to do your keyword research to find lower-cost “long tail” keywords - going after the big traffic keywords might be tempting, but it gets expensive and the ROI is often not the best.
- Use Article Marketing To Build Links
As with any tactic, I’d recommend using this one in moderation. Article marketing is, essentially, trading words for links. It can help with link building, but the quality of the links it garners is usually less than stellar.
Here’s how it works:
Write an informative article on your site topic (or something related)
Include an “about the author” section as well as links in the article that point to your pages using relevant anchor text
Submit the article through one of the many article syndication services (such as EZineArticles.com or GoArticles.com)
The deal is, anybody can come along and publish your article on their website - provided they use the article in its original format including the “about the author” section. So when the article is published, any links you include back to your site are published as well.
- Guest Post At Relevant Blogs
This certainly requires some up-front investment, mainly in terms of building relationships with bloggers in your topic (a little brown-nosing never hurt), but it can help get the flywheel turning for your site like nothing else can. Take the time to make your guest post remarkable and smart - your host blogger will appreciate it, and it’ll improve the likelihood of attention coming back to your site (which you’ll link to in your guest post, of course). Links from blogs are some of the most powerful editorial links you can get - don’t underestimate them for a second.
- Submit Your Site to Design Galleries
Is your website breathtaking to behold, beautiful enough to make angels weep? Yeah, sure it is. But seriously, if it looks pretty sharp there are plenty of web design galleries that accept submissions for new sites and link to the sites they feature. Particularly for CSS-driven design there are a number of galleries that will consider your site for listing (provided your site uses CSS for layout/styling - and God help you if it doesn’t) - including CSSElite.com, CSSHeaven.com, CSSBeauty.com and many others. Just search in Google for “CSS design gallery.” Unless your site is ugly - in that case, I can’t help you, and stop asking me to look at it.
- Sponsor a Local Event or Charity
OK, I admit this is kind of a tired tip - but it works! Especially for local small businesses. Is there a local event coming up in your community? A local charity that has a website? Not only will sponsoring such an event give you all of the normal PR benefits (and self-righteous bragging rights) that are the byproducts of charity, but any web announcement for the event will potentially include a mention of your website as well as a link to it. And you can feel good about yourself for a change.
Bonus Tip: Be Patient
Alright, this one is cheap, I admit it. Not much of a tip. But it’s important to remember that you’re not going to see your unique visitors count skyrocket immediately for your new website. Most “overnight successes” actually take a few years to get going.
And if you find yourself checking your traffic numbers on a daily basis, please do us all a favor - step away from the computer, go toss the ball around with your kid, maybe take your niece out for ice cream. Contrary to popular belief, staring at your site traffic data has no positive effect on it.
About The Author: Mike Tekula is the president of Unstuck Digital, a Long Island Web Design and Search Marketing agency based in Ronkonkoma, NY.
Posted via web from João’s posterous
by Joao Moraes on May 28, 2009
The following list of design mistakes addresses the needs of commercial Web sites, but it can easily be applied to personal and hobby sites and to professional nonprofit sites as well. When you start designing a Web site, your options are wide open. Yet all that potential can lead to problems that may cause your Web site to fall short of your goals.
- Failing to provide information that describes your Web site
Every Web site should be very clear and forthcoming about its purpose. After all, a good experience with a Web site that is not useful is more likely to get you customers by word of mouth than a Web site that is obscure and difficult to understand. It’s even important to explain why some people may not find it useful, providing enough information so that they won’t be confused about the Web site’s purpose. Either include a brief descriptive blurb on the home page of your Web site or provide an About Us (or equivalent) page with a prominent and obvious link from the home page that describes your Web site and its value to the people visiting it. It’s better to send away someone uninterested in what you have to offer with a clear idea of why he or she isn’t interested than to trick visitors into wasting time finding this out without your help.
- Skipping alt and title attributes
Always make use of the alt and title attributes for every XHTML tag on your Web site that supports them. This information is of critical importance for accessibility when the Web site is visited using browsers that don’t support images and when more information than the main content might otherwise be needed. The most common reason for this need is accessibility for the disabled, such as blind visitors who use screen readers to surf the Web. The purpose of alt and title tags is, in general, to enhance accessibility. Just make sure you don’t include too much text in the alt or title attribute -the text should be short, clear, and to the point. You don’t want to inundate your visitors with paragraph after paragraph of useless, vague information in numerous pop-up messages.
- Changing URLs for archived pages
All too often, Web sites change URLs of pages when they are outdated and move off the main page into archives. Popularity on the Web is built on word of mouth, and you won’t be getting any of that publicity if your page URLs change every few days. This can make it extremely difficult to build up significantly good search engine placement, as links to pages of your Web site become broken. When you first create your site, do so in a manner that allows you to move content into archives without having to change the URL.
- Not dating your content
Help your readers determine what information might be out of date by date stamping all the content on your Web site somehow, even if you only add “last modified on” fine print at the bottom of every content page. This content needs to be dated, so that your Web site’s visitors know what is new and in what order it appeared. Even in the rare case that Web site content does not change regularly, it will almost certainly change from time to time — if only because a page needs to be edited now and then to reflect new information. This not only helps your Web site’s visitors, but it also helps you: The more readers understand that any inconsistencies between what you’ve said and what they read elsewhere is a result of changing information, the more likely they are to grant your words value and come back to read more. People come back only if there’s something new to see. In general, you must update content if you want return visitors.
- Creating busy, crowded pages
Including too much information in one location can drive visitors away. Keep your initial points short and relevant, in bite-size chunks, with links to more in-depth information when necessary. The same principles apply to lists of links — too many links in one place becomes little more than line noise and static. Keep your lists of links short and well-organized so that readers can find exactly what they need with little effort. When that gets old, they stop reading altogether.
- Going overboard with images
With the exception of banners and other necessary branding, decorative images should be used as little as possible. Use images to illustrate content when it is helpful to the reader, and use images when they themselves are the content you want to provide. Images load slowly, get in the way of the text your readers seek, and are not visible in some browsers or with screen readers. Text, on the other hand, is universal.
- Implementing link indirection, interception, or redirection
Never prevent other Web sites from linking directly to your content. There are far too many major content providers who violate this rule, such as news Web sites that redirect links to specific articles so that visitors always end up at the home page. This sort of heavy-handed treatment of incoming visitors, forcing them to the home page of the Web site as if they can force visitors to be interested in the rest of the content on the site, just drives people away in frustration. When they have difficulty finding an article, your visitors may give up and go elsewhere for information. Perhaps worse, incoming links improve your search engine placement dramatically — and by making incoming links fail to work properly, you discourage others from linking to your site.
- Making new content difficult to recognize or find
In #4, we mentioned keeping content fresh and dating it accordingly. New content should stay fresh and new long enough for your readers to get some value from it. New content today should not end up in the same archive as material from three years ago tomorrow, especially with no way to tell the difference. By breaking up new items into categories, you can ensure that readers will still find relatively new material easily within specific areas of interest. Help them do that as much as possible. This can be aided by categorizing it, if you have a Web site whose content is updated very quickly (like Slashdot). Here’s another consideration: Any Web site whose content changes regularly should make the changes easily available to visitors. Effective search functionality and good Web site organization can also help readers find information they’ve seen before and want to find again.
- Displaying thumbnails that are too small to be helpful
When providing image galleries with large numbers of images, linking to them from lists of thumbnails is a common tactic. It’s also important to produce scaled-down and/or cropped versions of your main images, rather than to use XHTML and CSS to resize the images. When loading a page full of thumbnails that are actually full-size images resized by markup and stylesheets, a browser uses a lot of processor and memory resources. When images are resized using markup, the larger image size is still being sent to the client system — to the visitor’s browser. Browser crashes are even more effective at driving visitors away. This can lead to browser crashes and other problems or, at the very least, cause extremely slow load times. Slow load times cause Web site visitors to go elsewhere. Thumbnail images are intended to give the viewer an idea of what the main image looks like, so it’s important to avoid making them too small.
- Forgoing Web page titles
Many Web designers don’t set the title of their Web pages. A Web page title that is too long is almost as bad as no Web page title at all. It would be far more advantageous to provide a title for every page that identifies not only the Web site, but the specific page. This is obviously a mistake, if only because search engines identify your Web site by page titles in the results they display, and saving a Web page in your browser’s bookmarks uses the page title for the bookmark name by default. A less obvious mistake is the tendency of Web designers to use the same title for every page of the site. Of course, the title should still be short and succinct.
Enhance your Web site’s chances of success by keeping these design principles in mind. These considerations for Web design are important, but they’re often overlooked or mishandled. A couple of minor failures can be overcome by successes in other areas, but it never pays to shoot yourself in the foot just because you have another foot to use.
This information is based on the article “10 ways to improve the design of your commercial Web site,” by Chad Perrin.
Joao B. L. Moraes
Posted via email from João’s posterous
by Joao Moraes on March 5, 2009
This celebration of our Earth is a party that is beyond borders, religious beliefs, or dogma, bringing everyone on the face of the earth together as one just for one day as we all say together in one voice, We love our earth and we want to preserve her for our future and the future of our children! Our earth is too important to allow her to be abused and raped until there is nothing left for our children or our children to care for.
Our Earth Day Birthday campaign will require the efforts of a lot of people to help organize, channel and promote the biggest worldwide celebration of earth ever.
Earth Day began with tow men, John McConnell who was so inspired when he saw a photo of earth from space shot by the Apollo 10 team that he used it to design an Earth Day Flag.
Earth Day Birthday: Our First Campaign Our very first marketing campaign is for a non-profit and truly worthwhile cause: Earth Day!
Become part of the Earth Day Birthday story! Join us!
Best of all because the government saw that the people meant business and wanted an environmental change they passed a bill designating April 22 as a national day to celebrate the earth and from that came bills passing the creation of the United States environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Endangered Species, Clean Air, and Clean Water Acts.
That first party was a grassroots demonstration of people power and the response was electric as the America people took his message to heart and organized events all over America resulting in over 20 million party goers.
by Joao Moraes on December 10, 2008
Always determine your goals for blogging. Write the post in a personal way.
Share about your live. Your blog gets you closer to your customer.
It strengthens the relationship.
There are three risks with blogs:
- First, not being honest. Or pretending to be you are not.
- Second, not listening. Not listening is worse than not even asking.
- Third is consistency. Developing, planning and maintaining a blog takes a great time. This is a commitment.
Keep building your readership and online relationships.
by Joao Moraes on November 26, 2008
This is an answer from a Facebook friend to “John Doe”:
There are over 500 million pages indexed in Google for the word cards, each page means nothing to me. Why do you think your pages are any different? Is it because we are members of the same Facebook group?
When I need a solution for cards, I will turn to my network of people that I like and trust to find it.
Likewise, I listen to people who I like and trust. Only they could ever convince me I may need a {offenders key word} solution, when I didn’t otherwise know it…I could only ever consider doing business with someone I really liked and trusted..
That said, if the desired outcome of you introducing yourself to me was to have me buy from you, do business with you, or in fact collaborate with you on any level, from where I sit, as your target, your strategy is counter productive.
I will never listen to anyone who tells me they are interested in building a relationship with me followed by
shoving a self serving link in my face. The approach instills distrust in fact, making it even harder for you
to become someone I like or trust beyond such an introduction.
This is not social networking, It’s spamming.
To think that the caliber of people who have all congregated in our social traffic group see your approach
other way is miss-guided.
I have done you a favor and deleted your wall post off the group wall and from my personal feed so not that many people have seen them. This provides you another opportunity to introduce yourself with a mind set of being “Interested”, not “interesting”.
I am confident if you make the most of the opportunity you will be enlightened by the results. I would love to hear about your journey of discovery when you have arrived…
That’s when I can see us building a genuine relationship that will deliver your desired outcome and a hell of a lot more.
by Joao Moraes on November 19, 2008
Social Media is about your company’s image and gives a way to take an active role in managing your brand by interacting with your clients and continually promoting your brand. Most important: Social Traffic!
Social Traffic, if you don’t have one, get a copy whilst you can here.
You can raise your website’s visibility through meaningful communication opening a dialogue between you and your clients. Connect with your clients through the communities, examples:
- Create profiles in communities such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter,
- Comment blog posts.
- Create your own blog.
- Write articles.
- Disseminate using RSS feeds.
- Create and share picture content through Flickr, Webshots.
- Create and share video content through YouTube, Metacafe.
Social media allows you to become an active member establishing yourself as an leader and improve your visibility. It is most effective when utilized positively. Creating content, building relationships and being trustful in your community is the most important things to do.
Social Traffic was launched 1000 copies last week and sold out. Doors reopen to dowload more 300 copies
Posted by email from João’s posterous
by Joao Moraes on November 18, 2008
You share information and expose your community to your interests so, promote proper etiquette. The guy or gal who adds anyone is an example of improper use of Social Media. The concept is to create a community with similar interests for discussion and let the popular opinion grow your visibility. You may belong to several communities and you may have some of the same friends, that’s fine. Remain active in your communities by adding friends and contributing relevant content. Bulk adding friends, for no reason, is not good etiquette.
Communal sites are popularity contests. Trying to catalog massive amounts of unrelated friends is totally counterproductive. For the purpose of social media, you should concern yourself with quality, not quantity.
Using unsavory techniques is equivalent to spam and social media spamming is more atrocious than email spam, because the offending text is visible to everyone on the site. If you don’t have something relevant to say, don’t say anything at all.
by Joao Moraes on November 14, 2008
You probably know Simon Ford. He released his new book, Social Traffic.
It’s a fantastic resource about developing an online following of loyal & targeted contacts.
He’s giving out free 30 page preview edition!
You can get your copy here
If you’re not interested in getting the book, I at least recommend you getting the free preview version!
Latest stats show only 166 copies (of 10000) remaining. Enjoy this great book!
All my best and success to you!
Posted by email from João’s posterous
