SEO Hosting Blog

In the world of SEO, the vast majority of our discussions have to do with how to achieve better search rankings so that more people will come to your website. But today I don’t want to talk about getting traffic to your website. I want to talk about how to get people to come back to your website time and time again. See, it’s not enough to have someone stop by your website once. You want them to think your site is special, and you want them to be a repeat visitor.

Unfortunately, most optimized sites fail miserably at this. That’s because they get so focused on pleasing the search engines that they forget about human visitors. We’ve all seen these types of pages. They’re full of text (with maybe one cookie-cutter image), the design is boring, and they offer nothing to keep the visitor around.

So, what’s the key to keeping your website visitors coming back time and time again? It’s all about interactivity. Interactive websites make the users a part of the experience. Interactivity adds value to the website, and it provides an incentive for visitors to come back repeatedly.

Here are some tips for making your website more interactive.

•    Use Weekly Polls or Quizzes—One of the simplest ways to make your website interactive is to create a weekly poll or quiz question. A simple poll question can be placed in a box on the upper right hand corner of your website. Make sure the poll question is something related to your business but that your visitors will also care about. I like having weekly polls on a website because it makes the visitor feel as if their opinion counts. And at the end of the day, respecting your website visitor is the best way to keep them coming back. Just make sure you actually update your poll each week; otherwise, people will lose interest.

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Although the main focus of this blog will always be search engine optimization, I think everyone would agree that it is useful from time to time to explore other main areas of Internet marketing.

For today’s post, the specific area of email marketing that I would like to address is email marketing. Whether you are completely new to the concept of email marketing, have just dabbled in email marketing or are doing email marketing on a regular basis, it is something that can help you obtain quite impressive results.

If you don’t believe me, just look at the average ROI in four different industries that was compiled by SoftwareProjects from their own internal data:

Now that you have seen the impact that email marketing can have on your bottom line, I would guess that you are interested in learning a little bit more about this topic. Although there are a lot of different areas of email marketing that we could discuss, the one that I want to focus on today is gathering data. Like any type of Internet marketing, the key to being successful with email marketing is making sure that you are collecting data that you can use to analyze what is working and what is not working.

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Inspired by Garry Conn’s recent post about conversion rates, I thought it’d be a good idea to provide a sequel, if you will, that further explores how to improve conversion rates. Hopefully, this sequel is more like Godfather: Part II in quality than Godfather: Part III.

In Garry’s post, he mentioned that the volume of website traffic isn’t the most important factor in your online success. I agree. While it’s nice to see thousands of people visiting your website or blog on a consistent basis, quality of traffic trumps quantity every time. So, what can you do to improve the quality of your traffic?

• Content is King- Is there a more tired, hackneyed phrase in online marketing than “content is king?” Probably not, but the reason it continues to be used is because it’s true. And that goes for the quality of your website traffic too. Your content needs to be original, and it should fit within the theme of your site. Of course, it should be optimized for the search engines as well. However, always be careful not to get so caught up with keyword stuffing that you sacrifice the quality of your content. Furthermore, while it might be tempting to target every keyword out there, always remember that relevance is the key to quality. If a keyword isn’t truly relevant to what your website offers, don’t target it because it will bring low quality traffic. (more…)

It seems like I get at least one email each week from someone asking me about how to increase traffic to a blog or website. Usually after reading the email I’ll take a moment to visit the site that belongs to the person who wrote me. The complaint is very common: Bloggers and site developers feel that they need more traffic to make up for a loss in earnings that differ from what they had originally expected. They feel that by adding more traffic to their site it will then correct their deficit.

Having that said, I am not going to tell you that traffic is a bad thing. The more traffic we all get to our sites the happier we are, that’s a given. Who doesn’t want extra traffic? But that’s not the point. The problem is that most people think increasing traffic is the solution towards fixing a web site that is failing to earn money. That is far from the truth.

In most cases when I check out the sites of the people that email me asking for tips on increasing traffic, what I find is that their site has conversion cancer. Simply put, their websites or blogs are failing to convert for them. It doesn’t matter what it is, some people want to get more Google AdSense clicks, others simply want their visitors to purchase their eBooks. Whatever the call to action may be, It all boils down to the same thing; conversion, and the lack there of.

What good is increasing traffic if the current traffic you already receive doesn’t convert? If the existing traffic you receive doesn’t convert, do you really think that adding more traffic will help conversions? It won’t!

Something is wrong. You have to change something. If your blog or web site doesn’t have a lot of traffic, that is fine! Use that to your advantage. In my business, I based things off percentages rather than by units. In my fleet of a few hundred various sites I own, most are very low volume. Meaning each site I own typically gets around 100 visits per day. Most of my sites are monetized with Google AdSense. My aim is to score 10 clicks per site per day off 100 visits, which equates to 10% conversion.

On occasion, quite a few of my sites get bursts of traffic. When that happens, they still convert at 10%. When more traffic is added, say 1000 visits per day, I make more money off the added traffic because I still convert at 10%. The reason why is because I always focus on conversions based off low volume. Gaining massive amounts of traffic to a blog or web site is the single most difficult thing to achieve. My focus is in taking full advantage of the traffic that I do get.

Consider this and re-visit your blog or web site and ask yourself what you can do to capitalize on the current traffic you get. If making money using Google AdSense is your goal, then consider changing the position of your ads. Maybe change the size of your ad or even the colors. After you make changes, take note of the effects the changes have. If performance increases, try to tweak things even more. If after you tweak things further and find that the results depreciated your earnings, reset things back to how you had them previously, or try something different again.

You’d be amazed when you discover how simple it is to run tests on your site. The beauty of discovering how to score high conversions is the fact that once you discover what works, you can do what I do and duplicate your system over a few hundred times. My Google AdSense earnings for the month of December 2008 exceeded $10,000 USD. This was all generated on a few hundred low volume sites that achieve high conversion rates of 10% or higher.

Before you ask for advice on how to increase traffic, the better question to ask is how can I increase conversion off the current traffic I already receive.

(photo by Marcio Eugenio)

When utilized properly, your RSS feed can be one of the most effective ways to not only promote your blog, but to also develop a loyal following of readers. Because it makes their life a little bit easier (and is free for them to use), people are very receptive to signing up for RSS feeds.

Although you can still gain RSS subscribers by simply starting a blog and producing good content (since WordPress has RSS built directly into it), if this is all you choose to do, you are going to miss out on some great opportunities to make your RSS feed do even more work for you.

To help you do more with your RSS feed, let’s take a look at some strategies, services and plugins that can do a lot for you. Best of all, even if you haven’t taken advantage of the items we’re about to discuss, you can start implementing all of them today!

Explain RSS: Because you are involved in the Internet on a daily basis, you probably take for granted the fact that everyone knows what RSS is all about. However, I can guarantee you that if I ask someone like my Mom what RSS is, she’s not going to be able to explain it to me.

If you’re getting frustrated that more people aren’t subscribing to your blog, the problem may not be your content; it may be the fact that people don’t know what it means to “subscribe.” Therefore, next to your RSS sign-up area, you should add a link that says something like “What is RSS?” Because it’s entertaining and informative, I recommend adding this video to the page that the link leads to this video.

Add a Footer: I highly recommend installing the RSS Footer plugin. While it may not seem like much, you can actually do a lot with this plugin. Whether you add a copyright notice, promote a new product or service you are offering, or use it to sell advertising, this seemingly simple plugin can allow you to get more from the feed you are publishing.

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