Posts Tagged ‘Web Visitors’

Search Engine Traffic Is Best For Business Websites

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

I am now convinced that search engine traffic is best for business website. In the one year plus that I have been working on Nigerian Entrepreneur website, I have employed differ kinds of systems, strategies and tricks to drive traffic to the website. The result from each of the effort differs, but search engine traffic has finally stood out as the most reliable source of the much sorted targeted traffic which every business website crave for.

The following are some of the methods that I have employed to drive traffic to my website:

  1. Word of mouth – I tell anyone that cares to listen that I have a website.
  2. Email – I use the website address in my email signature.
  3. Advertisement on other websites – Some paid adverts, some free adverts.
  4. Link and Banner exchange – This is common among bloggers.
  5. Forum participation – I was active in over fifteen different communities.
  6. Comments on blogs – I drop quality comments in fellow bloggers ‘websites.
  7. Social Bookmarking e.g. Blogcatalog, Delicious, Tweeter, Entrecard, Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Reddit and several others.

Out of the seven website traffic strategies listed above, I spent more time on the last one, social network traffic. The reason why is obvious to the experts, it is the “get-quick-result” website traffic strategy. Unfortunately, it happens to be the most time consuming and least enduring website traffic generator.

Unlike the others, even if your website is one minute old, you can have 6,000 web visitors if you have a powerful social traffic club in place. Digg and StumbleUpon are notorious for such kind of feat. If a noteable Digg user or Stumbler smiles on your website and bookmark it, you will end up with more traffic than you can handle.

Why I don’t like Social Website Traffic

Social Website traffic requires constant participation in the social communities. You must keep on Stumbling, Digging making friends, doing others a favor so that you can get one in return and keeping yourself updated on the events in the social community so that you remain relevant. It is so much hard work and quite time consuming.

Why I settled for Search Engine Website Traffic

Search engine traffic is about the most difficult to build. It takes planning and focus. Before you can receive website traffic from the search engine, you must do your home-work on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), provide quality content and build quality back-links. This is not an easy task to perform. That is why many webmasters outsource their SEO and will rather pay for search engine traffic than work to rank high in the search engine. The ignorant ones, rely on social traffic to get visitors.

Well, the truth is that, social website traffic is indeed not the kind of traffic you are looking for. Social website traffic rarely converts to sale. Visitors that comes to your site from social communities such as StumbleUpon are not looking for what to buy, rather they are just STUMBLING around the web (the word “STUMBLING” is most appropriate to convene what I mean). If you are looking for buyers, or potential customers, you will be better off, getting targeted website traffic from the search engines.

Visitors from the search engines are people looking for a specific thing. They are not just passing away the time with the search engine, if you have what they need, or you have information on how they can get what they need, you can be rest assured that they will be happy to stay on your site. So what I have learned to do, can be broken down into three simple strategy:

  1. Get my website on-page and off-page Search Engine Optimization right.
  2. Provide Quality Content that address the need of the visitors that I am expecting.
  3. Go out to build backlinks from authority websites in the niche that I am targeting for traffic.

That sounds simple, isn’t it? Well, the truth is that it is difficult to accomplish. So why do I insist that search engine website traffic is the best method for an entrepreneur, the answer is that you get to do the hard-work only once! Yes, you heard me right. Once you do the hardwork well and you get it right, you can actually go on to some other things. The search engine will take over and continually send targeted visitors to your business website.

I learnt this truth after much Stumbling and Digging in the wrong places for website traffic that converts. Now I know better. I don’t have to drop 300cards per day, nor Digg stories I am not interested in just to please someone. Stumbling articles is now done at my pleasure, not as one of my daily TO DO TASK!

If you are serious about getting targeted website traffic that converts to sale, then it is high time you start working on those three points listed above. It is no gainsaying, search engine traffic is best for business websites, Nigerian Entrepreneur is a living proof .