Posts Tagged ‘Website Traffic’

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Why SEOs Fail In Social Media

Friday, October 19th, 2012

Few years ago, website owners who desire quality and consistent traffic of targeted consumers will naturally turn to a professional SEO (Search Engine Optimizer – that is a professional who practices search engine optimization of websites).  Well that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. The trend has suddenly changed because webmasters have noticed that SEOs are not as successful with Web 2.0 media environment as they were with its predecessors. Why are the SEOs failing where they formerly succeeded? What is the implication of this to webmasters and small business owners seeking for customers online.

SEO

The simple answer is that SEOs fail to adapt to the new Web 2.0 media environment and attempt to apply rules of the older Web to the new situation. Human beings are dynamic. What they like today, may not necessarily be what they will like tomorrow. So, a strategy that worked yesterday, may not deliver a good result tomorrow. Let’s look at some reasons why SEOs tend to fail in Web 2.0 media environment.

1) Preference to automation

It is an established fact that SEOs love to automate. On the contrary, social media encourages conversations among people. This tendency of encouraging automation makes SEOs a failure in social media. After all one prefers engaging conversation to an automated conversation. Your website must not place priority on the search-bots over human visitors.

2) Improper marketing strategy

SEOs believe in highlighting their services without caring if the people are listening. This strategy does rarely work as people care only when you ensure that you are caring for their needs. SEOs rarely do market research and instead go about bloating about their services. One converted social media user can do a lot of free marketing for you in his or her social media circles.

3) Materialistic approach

SEOs have become more materialistic with changing times. Their sole interest lies in increasing their brand value and earning more money. They lag behind on promoting social issues and rarely pay attention to social values and issues impacting our daily lives.

On the contrary social media has become a face of youth with a range of options available to showcase concern on issues affecting ones lives. Be it environment, culture or degrading social values, social media has risen to the occasion. SEOs are increasingly busy in minting money and hardly pay attention to this fact, thus making them perform miserably in social media.

4) More attention to keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing seems to be a mantra of success for those in SEO business. They hardly take pains to ensure that the work becomes an interesting read. This makes their task even more difficult as a common reader only wants engaging content. This is possible only if thorough research has been conducted. Repeating keywords in order to attract search engine bots produce a negative result with human visitors. Someone coming to your site for information on meeting a particular need will simply get irritated when he or she discovers that he was lured to a page that cannot meet such need. Social media scores a point on this account, thus leading to devaluation of SEO when it comes to sharing information when it comes to SEO sharing their information via the social media way.

5) Focus on page rank

SEOs still live in the past. They pay much attention to page rank. Page ranking was an imperative few years ago but changing scenario over the last few years has brought about a radical change in this thinking. A website may be having Page Rank 9, but it might still reflect at 1 position on Google. It’s all about quality content and fulfilling the aspirations of new tech smart generation. SEOs seem to be lagging on this front, thus making their task difficult when it comes to promoting services in social media.

6) Sneaky enough

Instead of building upon their brand through quality content promotion, people in SEO segment believe in quick gains. They fail miserably on social media as the audience is smart enough to smell a rat in this haste.

As webmaster or a small business owner, you need to consider the facts discussed above you part with your hard earned cash engaging the service of a self-acclaimed SEOs. Don’t get someone who will simply splash some keyword rich content on your website to attempt luring the search engine bots to position your website on page 1. Getting to the first page of the search engine result is not the goal, staying there and attracting consistent visitors who will become paying customers is the goal of every business website. So, there is need for your SEOs to understand your target market so that he can know how best to engage and keep their attention with dynamic content on your website.

When SEO tactics are over-used, they may end up harming rather than benefiting. Make sure you use SEO tactfully so as to maintain your readers’ loyalty without compromising quality. Many weary business owners have been burned by SEO firms who promise the world and then never REAL results. It might surprise you but it is a fact that SEOs have failed to make an impact when it comes to adapting to the rapidly evolving world of social media. It is unfortunate that many search engine optimizers still follow SEO 1.0 and have failed to adapt to web 2.0 media environment.

SEOs need to rethink and rework their strategies in order to make a worthy appearance in social media. Times are changing and the one who adapts to changing scenario will emerge victorious.

About The Author: Carol is an internet marketer. She loves writing and marketing. She is a big fan of Latest technology. These days she is thinking about latest technology used in upcoming iPhones.

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Posted in Blogging, Guest Post, small business, Tips & Tricks | 1 Comment »

See How Your Website Appears To Visitors

Monday, May 7th, 2012

I get easily blown away any time i discover what features or tools you can use to optimize a website.

There is a tool i just found out and it was created by a Google engineer. Google engineers are given opportunities to personally pursue projects as per ideas they conceived. It was during this moment of opportunity that this Google engineer created this feature.

This tool is the browser size tool

The feature helps to discover generally how much of your website is easily visible to readers. Websites appear differently to readers because of the sizes of their monitor screens, the browsers, the toolbars installed and so on. Thus some very important part of your website might not be easily visible to some readers unless they scroll down or sideways the page. Believe me some visitors do not bother to scroll through your page.

This I find very useful to website owners; especially if you have adverts or donate button positioned in places on your website. After checking out your website with this tool, you might want to reposition that advert so that it can be easily seen and clicked by visitors. Isn’t this a lovely revelation?

But you interested in how I found this out?

I made a call to a friend asking him to check out my website and make a comment on the design. He reported back to me that my website was okay but that it had just 2 Google adverts by Google and suggested I should include a last one allowable by Google. I replied that i had all 3 ads on the site. He checked again but this time he had to scroll the page before he could see the website. I immediately noticed and recognized this problem and jumped into the Google search engine to search for how I can correct this issue.

But then I decided to find out first how my website does look like to readers and boom………I bumped into this wonderful tool.

Whenever you are at the newspaper stand, you will see the front page headlines at the top of the newspapers before anything else. You won’t see the bottom headlines of some newspapers because it is folded. This is why adverts placed at the top of newspapers are more expensive than their counterparts placed below. This is also the same concept of how a website appears to the visitors at first sight.

So go check up your blog or website now and see if there are things that are hidden but you need to be visible on first look. Go to www.browsersize.googlelabs.com. Once you get there, type in your website url and you have a view of what we are talking about here.

About the author: Jide is an internet publisher. He publishes in hubpages and he also publishes jobs in jobnetworknigeria, a job platform where job searchers finds new jobs in Nigeria.

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Posted in Blogging, Guest Post, Wordpress | 1 Comment »

Using Articles As Affordable Internet Marketing Tools

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

How To Use Articles as Online Marketing Tools

Wondering how to promote your website or product with a shoe string budget, then you need to read this article on  using articles as affordable internet marketing tools to the end. It is an established fact that content is King. However, where the content is residing is an important factor that determines whether it will be featured in SERP  (search engine report pages) or not. If your website is new or unknown to the search engine spiders, whatever you write and post on the website may not be discovered by online surfers. So, it is actually content that is of good quality and has been discovered by online users that get crowned king.

If you’ve observed, search engines tends to give preference to articles hosted by popular article directories such as Ezinearticles.com and GoArticles.com.  Often, if any of the highly rated article directories has an article for the searched item, it will most likely be displayed on the first page of the search engine report page. Guess what, you can use that to your advantage.

All you need to do is sit down and write a quality article that provides needed information about the product or need your website is focused on. After writing the article, take time to go through it and ensure that your keywords are evenly distributed within the content of the article while maintaining the natural communication tone. Note that some of the popular article directories moderate articles before publishing. If your article is considered as link bait because it has an overdose of particular keywords, it will be rejected and not published.

After writing the article, insert a link to your website in the resource box and give a little information about your website too. Some article directories will permit you to insert one or two links in the body of the article. In that case, I suggest you use your keyword phrase as anchor text to link back to a popular article on your website. This has several advantages which we will talk about later.

So, what is the catch? When keywords related to the articles you submitted are typed on search boxes of search engines, indexed websites containing articles with those keywords will be displayed. Since most of the popular article directories are already having a high pagerank with many of the search engines, you have a good chance of having your article turning up within the first and second page of the search engine report. (Note, this may not happen immediately, sometimes, it takes between three days or more before you start seeing the result.)

How to get your articles listed

Since you are not the only one submitting articles to the article directories, you need to understand that what turns up for a particular article directory will be the best the search engine feels that particular article directory has to offer. You can guess what happens, if there is a better article already submitted to the article directory on the same subject you wrote on, yours may not be presented.

Wondering how to tackle that? This is what I do. I simply search the article directory first before writing any article. When I’ve gotten the best article it has to offer on a particular topic, I take time to read the article and find out all the flaws I can get about the article. After all that I simply sit down and produce an article that is far superior in quality to the existing article on the directory.

After submission and the article is published, I go back and use social media like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit etc to promote the article. That way, it gets more focus within the article directory and is ranked higher than the existing articles.

When eventually the article turns up in the SERP, it will start generating traffic to your website in two ways. First, some readers will click the link in the resource box to visit your website. Also, some webmaster who are too busy to write articles for their site will post those articles on their website thereby giving you free link-back to your site.

What are the benefits of Using Articles As Internet Marketing Tools?

1. Articles are free promotional tools for internet marketing. The only possible cost you may incur is your time. Well, I took for granted that you already paid your Internet Service Provider. That’s it. All you need is your thoughts, your computer, and your hands. If you have those, nothing will stop you from typing words that will produce a high quality article for your internet marketing. Well, if you’re too busy or too lazy to write an article, then you may need to spend some cash by outsourcing to ghost writers who can do the job for you for some few dollars.

2. Articles are a sure way of making people know that your website exist. If you submit several articles of yours to article directories that get the most web traffic, you can be rest assured that in less than no time your website will get noticed by search engine visitors and visitors from the article directories.

your ranking on the SERP will go up..

3. Articles offers a free way of obtaining one way back links automatically. When you submit your articles to directories, surely, other websites will make use of your articles. If you have inserted links to your website in the resource box or the body of the article, you can be rest assured that this will cause your website to get higher ranking in the SERP thereby increasing search engine traffic to your website.

4. With Articles You Can Make Yourself an Expert In Your Niche. You can easily improve your online reputation by writing quality articles that presents you as an authority in your chosen field. As an Internet marketer, if you plainly display your products on your website, you will not gain much conversion rate. Conversion is when your traffic converts to sales. You have to show that you are knowledgeable on your field. People like listening and buying from people they consider experts. Articles have a way of showing you off as an expert in a chosen field. If your articles meet the need of the readers, they simply assume you know what you’re talking about. They won’t get to discover that you were only using materials freely available online to meet their need until you accept an interview with Oprah or Larry King. As long as you keep your profile low offline, nobody will discover that you were only recycling information.

Update: Don’t submit an article you have already published on your website to any article directory. Such action is counter productive, as you may get Penalized by some of the search engine for duplicate content.

Start Your Internet Marketing Campaign Now

There is no better time to start using articles for your online marketing campaign. Get into action now, make your creative juices flow as you start producing articles for your internet marketing campaign. I perceive you are already having some ideas popping into your heart as you read this, jot down those ideas quickly to jumpstart your article writing momentum. With those benefits listed above, I believe I’ve been able to motivate you to start using articles as your affordable internet marketing tools. I’ll love to hear your views in the comment section. Cheers.

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Posted in Blogging, Entrepreneur, small business | 30 Comments »

Work Smart Get Search Engines Traffic

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

Work Smart Get Search Engines Traffic

Do you need targeted traffic? If you answer is yes, then my advice is that you stop working hard and start working smart to get search engines traffic. If you are wondering what I am talking about, here is a little background information.

As a blogger and a webmaster, one of my goal is to have consistent and relevant traffic for my numerous websites. Before the year 2009, my understanding was that the more I socialize on the different social bookmarking websites, like Digg, StumbleUpon, BlogCatalog etc, the more popular my websites will become. So, I started the year 2009 with the zeal of increasing my participation in the various social websites that I had joined in earlier years.

I labored and joined several social communities. I was very active and participated in all manner of gimmicks to attract visitors to my website. Well, did I see result? Yes, I did. The more I participated, the more I saw increase in the number of visitors that visited my websites. However, I noticed two facts that made me felt that something was terribly wrong.

1. Even though visitors came, they were not spending time to read my posts nor comment. This was evident from the high bouncing rate that Google Analyticals recorded for the site and the zero comments that many of my articles were recording.

2. I was not making money as I expected. A glimpse into the statistics of those visiting my website showed the reason. They were fellow bloggers who only came around because I  had earlier visited their blogs. They were simply reciprocating love!

The situation was very depressing and I almost gave up because I was getting burnt-out. I spent hours laboring online but was not seeing the desired result. Well, all that is history now. I can sincerely say that every little effort that I put into my websites yield results that I am proud of. It all started when I learned to stop working hard and started working smart on my websites.

There are three key lessons that I have learned that is giving me the present result that I am having. If you practice them, you will soon start testifying too. It may be slow at first, but when it starts paying dividend, it pays good dividend. Here are the three points.

Write for Human Consumption

If you write articles that cater for humans needs, you can be rest assured that they will not hurry away when they visit your website. They will definitely stay and devour articles upon articles and will likely drop comments on those they find really interesting. That is a sure cure  for reducing your website bounce rate.

Arrange Your Writings To Get Search Engine Robots Attention

Unlike human beings that are interested in their needs being met by the content of your articles, Search Engine robots judge your articles based on certain parameters. For example, a search engine robot will try to figure out what your article is all about by identifying the keywords used in the article,how many times the keywords were used and the positioning of the keywords. Based on this and its driving algorithm, it will categorize the article and rate it. So while your article that is so rich in content is nowhere to be found on the SERP (search engine reports page), a junk article that has its keywords well arranged will be ranked higher and may find its way into the first page of the SERP.  So, you need to understand at least a little bit of SEO (search engine optimization) so that you can arrange your article well. If you don’t understand SEO, then I advise that you pick up tutorials and get yourself educated. A good place to  start learning is the The Keyword Academy. If you can’t be bothered then you need to outsource your SEO to a professional. If you don’t get your onsite SEO right, the search engines will not be rank your websites content well, and that invariably means they will not send you any traffic!

Get Relevant Backlinks From Related Websites

Finally, I recomend you spend time getting backlinks from related websites. My tutor in SEO recommends that I spend 30% of my time writing good articles that are well presented and 70% building backlinks. A good place to start building backlinks is dropping  comments on blogs and making posts in relevant forums. If you are permitted by the webmaster of the blog or forum, use your keywords as anchor text to link back to your website articles (not the home page!). This will help your articles to get well ranked in the search engine reports pages.

As you may have guessed, this is where the real work lies. You have to be persistent in building backlinks as it is a slow job. You may not see the result of what you’re doing immediately, except if your niche is unoccupied by better competitors. Also, some search engines, e.g. Google Robot are skeptical about new websites, so your website may be placed in the sandbox for some months just to double check that it is authentic and not a spam-farm. During such period, you will receive no traffic for all your effort. However, if you persist, after about six months (maximum, sometimes it is less than that) you will start receiving traffic.

Why I love Search Engine Traffic

The good news is that once the search engines start sending you targeted traffic, it gradually increases in volume. At first the traffic may be in trickles, but as you continue to write more quality articles and practice good onsite SEO the number of your articles that will be well ranked in the search engine reports page will increase. Then, you can say goodbye to laboring in social network websites forever.  This is not an academic thesis, this website is a living proof that these three simple tips works. So, if you are really interested in getting quality website traffic that will translate into income, then you need to stop working hard at the social network sites and start working smart for search engine traffic.   😉

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Posted in Blogging, Tips & Tricks | 37 Comments »

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 .

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Posted in Entrepreneur, small business | 13 Comments »

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