Traffic

[Dailyhappy]

Hi

Can anyone recommend any FREE or inexpensive services to boost traffic levels? We have seen things like Autohits247 but not entirely sure what it is or indeed if it'll do us any good, looks like an automated hits generator running in a browser which may show loads of hits but would not get any adsense revenue. We are finding that formum postings are good for traffic but soon drop off if you do not spend most of the day in them, no suprises we're also finding the more relevant content we put on the site the balance of traffic starts to swing way over to the search engines, we are happy that at our current low levels we are getting a good click through ratio, if only we could increase the traffic it'll surely fly! Guess lots of people have been in the same spot at some time. We are doing most of the other suggested things like PR, links, Webring, forums, signatures etc.

Any suggestions for the traffic hungry celebrity gossip site?

Thanks
Neil
aka ED Daily
Celebrity Editor
The Daily Happy
www.thedailyhappy.com
be the first to nose!

[Chris]

Well firstly you should probably know that using auto programs or bots to generate your adsense income is against the Adsense TOS.

As for getting traffice. Well I'd suggest start submitting your sites to some directories and getting some inbound links with some good anchor keywords that your site is relevent to. Hopefully within a month a serach engine like MSN will pick you up and being to rank you. Yahoo takes a little longer to see result son normally, and Google can take months and months to be fully indexed.

A popular method that loads of people are doing these days is writting articles and submitting them to article directories for other websmasters to use on their own sites. When a website owner put an article on their site they have to put your site's link on as well which is a great way to get you a few inbound links in addition to a bit of traffic from the people clickthrough to your site.

There are just a couple of suggestions. At the end of the day search engines are the key I believe for free and easy traffic - but they take time and they require you to make a quality site with loads of quality content and then implement a bit of SEO.

Best of luck.

[Dailyhappy]

Yes I was not sure what the auto things were, glad I asked first thanks!
We'll keep on the links thing and articles as suggested.
MSN wise for 'Latest Celebrity Gossip' we jumped to page one in a few short weeks, but we need lots of other keywords to get the traffic. Thanks for taking time to make the suggestions.

Neil
The Daily Happy
www.thedailyhappy.com
be the first to nose!

[Chris]

Well if you want to rank well for MSN something I have noticed of late is how much MSN loves title tags (<title>) you need to make sure the keywords you want to rank for are in there and that the keyword pharses appear in your actual content.

Here is a forum that I run - nothing that special - www.rsboards.com

Now if you look at the title I have given my forum "RuneScape Boards - Forums, Clans, Tips, Help, Hints, Quest Guides 2" that has a lot of keywords in it. Now if you goto MSN and type in any of these keyword pharses see what comes up:

http://search.msn.com/

Runescape Boards
Runescape Forums
Runescape Clans
Runescape Tips
Runescape Help
Runescape Hints
Runescape Quest Guides

My site will be in the top 5 for all of them. Also I find that the close the keywords are in both your title and content matters. So make sure when writting your content that your major keywords are close and in your title put your most specific keywords at the beginning.

[imike]

One of the way to help you get more traffic as the times goes by and improve your site rankings and traffice is to link exchange. You should start doing more link exchange with site similar to you. Do it on a regular basis and after some time you will see good results from it. :)
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[Sagita]

Tell me, how do you treat Alexa Traffic Rank? Some are really sweat it, seems like it is the most accurate indicator for your site traffic. However, some others seem only ignoring it.

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[Dailyhappy]

For the time being I have stopped checking Alexa as the traffic for my blog site http://thedailyhappy.blogspot.com/ shows 35,082 links (I Wish!) - it seems to relate to Blogger and not my blog.

Having said that I have always used Alexa to check other sites I have worked with, although you have to be getting loads of traffic to show up.

[brian@my-affiliate-progra]

Hey DailyHappy,

I think personally Chris has given some great advice, I have found that nearly all "traffic systems" are pure rubbish. When you think about it too it just makes sense, how can some crappy members site drive any real traffic to a site.

Focus on what matters most:


Quality Content NOT already online
Inbound links
Well crafted pages using basic seo principles
Smart adsense blending of ads


It all starts with the content, this is probably the most important thing, write good content and links will come without effort. I really don't worry about anything else when launching a new site but content. Spending hours trying to tweak ads makes no sense with nearly 0 visitors :)

Instead keep writing, and when you do post to your blog or make a new page make sure your targeting keywords that either pay fairly well OR have little competition and a high KEA (which will mean an easier time ranking well for that term).

Once you have some good content then start thinking about inbound links.


Reciprocal links exchanges work
Try getting other webmasters to "blogroll" your site (your good content will help)
Use of articles works awesome as others have noted
Link Vault
Ect ....

[Dailyhappy]

Yes Chris gave some top tips, but 80% of my SE traffic already comes from MSN, more luck than judgement (perhaps!) "latest celebrity gossip" and "celebrity gossip" on MSN brings most of the traffic with more strategic "star-name + gossip" gets me a dribble of traffic from Google. Having said that I was surprised when I recently tried out Wordtracker which got me thinking on the selection of keywords Vs competing sites in my chosen market....In fact the number of people searching for latest celebrity gossip are fairly minimal (could be a key pointer!). You also have to think logically as news related keywords drop out of fashion VERY quickly "Tom baby news" being a good example, it was top of the pops over a 90 day period, but as they had the baby it's now old news and has dropped way off.

I've looked at Link Vault although could not see if I could drop it into a Blogger Blogger template as it asks for ASP or PHP etc.

Will also look at the blogroll approach.

thanks again for the tips.
ED

[Chris]

Yes Chris gave some top tips, but 80% of my SE traffic already comes from MSN, more luck than judgement (perhaps!) "latest celebrity gossip" and "celebrity gossip" on MSN brings most of the traffic with more strategic "star-name + gossip" gets me a dribble of traffic from Google. Having said that I was surprised when I recently tried out Wordtracker which got me thinking on the selection of keywords Vs competing sites in my chosen market....In fact the number of people searching for latest celebrity gossip are fairly minimal (could be a key pointer!). Your on the money, this sort of analysis (at least from my perspective) is critical. If you want loads of traffic the place to start is tackling the little fish first. The way I normally do it is develop a fair general all encompassing site that also delves into specific topics. I mentioned a few of the keyword phrases I rank for:

Rune Scape (1500/day)
Runescape Tips (700/day)
Runescape Help (300/day)
Runescape Quest Guides (200/day)
Runescape Clans (200/day)
Runescape Clan (150/day)
Runescape Hints (150/day)
Runescape Videos (150/day)
Runescape Forums (100/day)
Runescape Pking Videos (100/day)
Runescape Scams (100/day)

Behind each of those keywords is the number of times a day the term is searched, and for all of those terms my site ranks fairly well in all three search engines, but what I don't rank that well for is the most competitive term "Runescape" it's not that I rank terribly for it (Google 21st, MSN 22nd, Yahoo 8th) it's more that I just I rank so much better for these other terms that are really pulling me the majority of my traffic, and they are the keywords I focus on. I mean I could spend literally months attempting to get my site to rank in the top 10 of Google for the term "Runescape" and I'd probably still never get there considering the size of the site's I'm competing against. But what I do that those other big sites don't is optimise for the smaller phrases, and that gets me hundreds, more often than not, thousands of visitors a day all because I tackled the small fish, and with every passing week I'm getting closer and closer to being able to compete with those bigger sites which is when I will focus on the bigger keywords. So in my opinion I think it is important to focus on the keyword phrases that are easier to target and get results with. The keyword "Runescape" is AT LEAST 6.5 time more competitive than any of those keywords I have listed - so it makes sense to me to invest 10% of the effort for essentially what will get you 80% of the return, but hey that is just my spin on it.

Whilst I wouldn't say my sites are created and designed purely for making money from Adsense I'm definitely not adverse to making money on the side, and I love making my sites popular for everyone to enjoy. I setup a World of Warcraft site about 8 months ago (yes I mainly starting gaming sites like Runescape, World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy - but it's what I enjoy and as I have said the money in them isn't huge but I make them for other reasons). Anyway being in the World of Warcraft industry highlighted a funny example of people really targeting keywords that are hard to ever really achieve good ranks with, especially with Google being picky on letting new sites rank well for competitive keywords. Anyway essentially in the WoW industry 90% of Adsense advertising is around the topic of "World of Warcraft Gold" and there are hundreds and thousands of sites out there trying to optimise for that keyword which is crazy because it is the hardest keyword pharse in the industry to optimse for, even harder than actuall keyword phrase "World of Warcraft". Why do they do it - because it the best paying Adsense keyword in the topic as well as being a fairly popular keyword by itself. The crazy thing is, no matter what, if you put Adsense on a World of Warcraft site you are virtually guaranteed that you are going to have some WoW Gold Ads because it pretty much the only thing advertised in teh industry. Yet despite this I get the distinct impression that people think but creating WoW Gold pages that the visitors they get are going to be already interested in WoW Gold and want to click the Adsense ads more, and sure that is very logical, but they never get any visitors because they never rank for their keywords. I on the other would prefer to slash my CTR by half, even more, but have 10 times the traffic by competing for keywords that I can actually rank for. Again that's just me, but I know I'm getting 700+ unique visitors a day to my WoW site which is less than a year old, whereas these other sites are getting next to nothing - how do I know because I getting hired to SEO some Gold Selling stores, and it's incredible how little traffic some of these stores get from search engines, and these are people that are actually paying for advertising and SEO let alone someone trying to make it the free way.

So what am I trying to say, I guess it is this; Traffic is the name of the game when it comes to making it big with Adsense. No matter how amazing your blending at the end of the day if no one sees it you won't earn anything. So do be stuck in this mindset of having to try and optimise for the big keywords, go for the little fish, but get ranked well for 10 - 20 of the moderately popular keywords and they will get you 80% of what being ranked in the top 5 of the most popular keywords would have brought you, and it will be at 10% of the effort required.

Good luck.