A good position in the organic search results for your products and services will provide many relevant and qualified visitors. The optimal way is for your products and services to be visible in both the organic search result and sponsored links. Thus providing the maximum reach and exposure. Sponsored links are fast and efficient and can cover thousands of keywords, whilst search engine optimization in the long run will ensure that the most relevant visitors find the web site.
If you get thousands even millions of hits that resulted in no sales or if you were to get just a few hundred hits that resulted in many sales and spending a lot of money on a great website when its not reaching the right audience.
Every site on the internet has one objective, to get more and more web traffic, and for e-commerce sites the operative word is sales targeted traffic. The term sales targeted traffic refers to web traffic that is specifically selected or directed to a website that will increase the probability of the sales of services or products. Although no one can guarantee web traffic that will buy your products or services.
Unlike others when we talk about increase online traffic, more web site traffic or increased web site traffic we are not simply referring to increasing hits, increasing pageviews, increasing sessions and increasing unique visitors. We think about increasing internet sales as really that is the ultimate goal whether like us, you are service orientated company or selling products via ecommerce.
At times increased internet sales and increased online traffic do go hand in hand however we have seen many sites that have a substantial amount of visitors with a low amount of internet sales. Two factors have been to blame for this, because they had concentrated on key phrases that have a higher search rate but were not properly related to their business and because the text had been so optimized for key phrases that it no longer compelled the website visitor to buy or enquire.
So the key is not to simply increase online traffic it is to increase relevant visitors to your website. The first step in accomplishing this task is to analyze your current website and ascertain all the relevant factors such as keywords, site architecture, links, keyword density, site persuasiveness and metatags.
Once an evaluation has been conducted and problems corrected we can then start to increase online traffic and internet sales in the correct manner. Some of the techniques we employ depending upon your requirements are, RSS feeds, forums, newsletters, syndicate content and linking campaign to name but a few.
Relevant traffic effectiveness, and is strongly and positively correlated with persistent behavior – the more relevant the visitor, the more likely they are to be persistent.
Relevance is largely to do with the niche or topics from which the traffic originates – for instance, if your site had a Science and Technology theme, a visitor from a link on another Science-oriented website would most probably be far more relevant than a visitor from another generally-themed website.
Forcing traffic to your site through traffic exchange programs or other (altogether more nefarious) means is likely to result in a very poor quality of traffic – the relevance is likely to be very low, and the nature of programs such as these tends to mean persistence is very low as well. This constitutes very poor traffic, and any sort of scheme that offers a sudden spike in raw traffic figures usually means this sort of poor visitor.
The best relevance comes from organic traffic – i.e. traffic from Search engines. If a user is looking for information on a particular (and specific) term, and lands on your website, that visitor is likely to be relevant to the topics of your site. Of course, the relevance of organic traffic can vary. Specialist search engines that deal with only one particular niche or topic can offer incredibly targeted traffic – although usually at the cost of quantity of traffic.
Relevance is something which search engine optimizers and even the search engines themselves talk about at great length – and it really is one of the fundamental aspects of modeling the word wide web. Getting relevant visitors is key in establishing a successful website – and, unlike persistence, relevance is a lot harder to gauge.
Good traffic comprises relevant visitors who are likely to fulfill a desired action on your website, whether it’s to make a purchase, e-mail or call, subscribe to a newsletter or what have you.
Poor traffic, even in extraordinary amounts, is a waste of bandwidth. No matter how impressive the numbers, the wrong crowd won’t bring you desired results.
1. Define how much your visitors are worth.
This is a step that can be done at any point in the process of your website, but must be done before you review your text link effectiveness.
You are essentially going to define the desired action that you you want each visitor to make and then define a value for that action. There are a number of possible actions depending on your website including a sale, a lead, a visitor, a comment, or anything else that you would consider a conversion. Once you define the action, you need to place a monetary value on that action. You can normally do this by calculating how much you make on the average conversion. This can be very difficult for lead generating sites or non-sales, but you must calculate some baseline value for the text link tracking to be effective.
2. Find relevant topics to your website.
The goal of this step is only to identify suitable topics that your website could benefit from advertising on. We’re not trying to find actual websites yet.
There are likely to be a number of related topics that your website will fall under. Targeting these topics in addition to the one’s your website is primarily focused on will increase your advertising options, but will keep your visitors targeted.
For example, if you sell web design services, similar topics could include web hosting, php programming, SEO, pay per click advertising, etc. These topics are similar but are not overly broad. An example of an overly broad topic would be computers. Yes, computers are related to web design, but the chance of someone searching for computers in reference to a web designer is relatively low.
3. Find websites in those relevant topics that allow advertising.
This is the most difficult step in the process. Finding websites that allow advertising, but at a cost that is low enough to make it worth advertising on is not always an easy task.
I strongly recommend against advertising on large website networks. While these sites could potentially provide a lot of traffic, they are very expensive to advertise on, and more often than not, they send un-targeted traffic that is a waste of money for text link advertising purposes. If you are on a branding mission and money is no concern, then by all means spend away.It is normally a waste of time to solicit to websites that don’t offer advertising, as it will be taken as spam, and will be unlikely to even get a reply.
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4. Track referrals from those websites for a minimum of three months.
Tracking your text links is absolutely key to finding out whether they are worth the money or not. Lets face it, if you aren’t getting any SEO benefit, so why would you want to keep paying for a worthless link.
I have used several tracking systems, and the best I have found for this purpose is hitslink. Hitslink is cheaper than other more robust tracking systems, still offers the necessary features and is easily configurable. I’m sure that there are hundreds of possible systems out there, probably in the same price range as hitslink, so by no means do you have to use any particular system. Just make sure that you can track and label visitors from a domain or by using a url tracking code.
Also make sure that if you are targeting a topic on your website to use the specific page for that topic, if applicable. This can help increase the chance that visitors will complete a desired action.
5. Analyze your data and determine if the link is acceptable.
After the initial three months is up, it’s time to analyze your text link. Build a report for the three months of traffic from a particular text link. You should have the total number of referrals from that link, and the number of conversions from those referrals. If you are basing your visitor values from a per sale percentage, you should have the total dollar amount generated by those referrals.
Using the example earlier of $50 per lead, I’m going to make a simple table showing whether a text link was effective or not.
Lets assume that I pay $30 per month for a text link on a website. I tracked all of the visitors and all of the leads from that link for a period of three months.
Since I value each lead at $50 and I received 2 leads, I made $100 from the referrals that the website sent me. It cost me a total of $90, therefore my Return on Investment (ROI) is ($100 – $90)/$90 or 11%. This means that for every dollar I spend, I get back one dollar and eleven cents.
11% is nothing to brag about, but it is a positive return which is what is important.
With that in mind, as long as I receive a positive return on a text link, I stick with it. I also will sometimes stick with a site for another round of three months if I still have hopes for it. If I don’t think that I am going to pull a positive return from a link, I drop it. Six months is definitely long enough to get a solid prediction, so after six months, if the site isn’t worth it, get rid of it.
It is common for sites to send very few visitors some months, and a lot on another month. For this reason three months is the absolute minimum amount of time to develop an accurate model of what you can expect from a website.
Good:
1. Link exchanging with other relevant sites. You can put a description of your site beside your link, therefore the visitors you get will already know what they are looking for and will have decided themselves that they would like to visit your site.
2. Search engine optimization for the keywords that your site is about. When someone searches for a term, they are looking specifically for sites around that term therefore if your site is well optimized for good keywords then you should be able to gain some quality visitors from the search engines.
3. Free ebooks and reports are excellent as you can provide quality information about your subject and then link to your site from within the product. Doing this will mean that people will first read your product if they are interested in the subject, enjoy reading your product and then want to get more information and that is when you can give them a link to your site.
Bad:
1. Buying loads of visitors for a few dollars. It is possible to buy good traffic but only when you are in control of how they find your site. You will find that most companies that offer traffic for a price will normally only send autosurfers and people who are not in the least bit interested in your site to it.
2. Autosurf programs are not a good source of traffic as people will just leave their computer on and let it surf from site to site without anyone actually getting to view and stay at it.
3. Advertising on sites that have absolutely nothing to do with yours. If you have a site about cooking, then you will have very little success by advertising on a site about computer games. That’s just an example of the top of my head but I mean that you should not advertise on sites that are not related to yours.
There are many different ways to get traffic and many of them work very effectively, however, I would definitely advise anyone not to simply go out and look for ways to get any sort of traffic but instead look for ways to get good traffic that is actually interested in visiting your site and seeing what you have to offer.