Affordable Website Promotion

4 Sep

It cannot have missed the attentions of many website owners that PageRank has not, on the whole, updated since April. Easter weekend in fact. Aside from a few small tweaks here and there very little changes have taken place for 5 months.

Given that sites that had been around for a few months when the last update took place might only have got a PR0, some quite old sites with a lot of good links could still be showing a PR0.

Whilst most PageRank sceptics will say that it doesn't really matter to traffic, it does and it can make a whole lot of difference. If you have the Google Toolbar installed and as you enter a site you see it is PR0, your first impressions are set as it is a new and unimportant site.

But, if you see PR5, PR6 or above then there is a good chance that you lean back in your chair and prepare to browse around this highly authoritative site that you have just stumbled upon. This means more pages read and more chance of uncovering interesting material and maybe you deciding to follow their RSS feed and come back at a later date.

So PageRank does matter and a September update for all of those that are waiting would be fantastic!

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25 Aug

Plenty of people everywhere are asking the same question - "How can I increase my website traffic?" Yet many people overlook an essential part of this area and that is in retaining the visitors that you have got.

It's fine to spend days link building and article writing. You can spend thousands on pay per click and banner adverts and you can even run affiliate schemes.

But, these all have one thing in common - they are costly and are aimed at driving new visitors.

It is in fact far cheaper to work at retaining current visitors. In fact, it is free. Instead of worrying how to attract the next 100 visitors, a lot of which might just instantly bounce, instead concentrate on appealing to those visitors that you already have.

For example, on a blog use Feedburner and watch which of your posts are generating the most interest from RSS subscribers. Use Google Analytics to see which pages are read most often and what terms people are using to find your site.

Now, go away and write more content to appeal to these people. If they have already found your site, especially the RSS users, then give them a reason to keep reading. That reason is more of what they are looking for.

By doing this you are slowly building a loyal following of readers. You might be surprised at what they are preferring to read, but give them what they want and they will keep coming back.

And then they might start sharing posts and pages with their friends, bookmarking you on social media and generally helping you to find more readers.

Yes, it is a lot slower than investing in PPC. But, the advantage is that it is building readers that are genuinely interested in you and your site rather than random visitors who might only stay on the site 2 seconds.

The downside is that regular readers are less likely to click on your own PPC adverts, but with a regular band of readers, they should be helping to spread the word of your site and it is giving you a target to work with when creating new content.

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21 Aug

If you are wanting to create an instant stream of traffic to your website then there is an easy way, although not necessarily that cheap!

You can instead of building a website from scratch buy an existing website. I've just been approached by an existing business without a successful website, asking if I would be willing to sell them one of my portfolio of websites. Of course, being in it just for the money, I said I would consider any reasonable offer!

Is it a good way to go though? You really need to look at the existing traffic and what you could do with that website to nurture and increase that website traffic. But, if there is some traffic to the site and it looks as though the traffic will last, then buying an existing website can turn out long term to be very good value for money.

What you need to look at is not what it costs you, but how much traffic the site is receiving and how much it would cost you in Pay Per Click and other advertising streams to generate that much traffic.

If that equation shows that you will pay a lot less per thousands hits by buying a website than you would through other advertising streams, then you know which way is the cheapest and which method you should be looking at!

So, if you want an instant hit on website traffic, think of buying an existing website with plenty of traffic. It could be well worth it in the long run.

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11 Aug

By watching your traffic carefully, you really can increase your website traffic. So, what must you do?

Well how can watching statistics help you gain more visitors? We will look at two elements. The first is encouraging existing visitors to come back and the second is finding new visitors.

You can use various tools to monitor your website traffic, depending on how you use the site. You might use Google Analytics to track page views and search engine terms and Feedburner to track readers of your RSS feed.

By carefully studying your traffic - looking at how people are finding your site; the pages they are reading and for blogs the pages regular readers are viewing - you can determine which of the pages are attracting visitors and what is the most successful content.

For example, if Feedburner shows that a particular post has been read a lot more than other posts, you know that the title and content of the post has attracted more interest from your loyal readers. Therefore, you can write more content based around these same themes.

You can also see what search terms are creating traffic to your website and write specific information based on these terms. Not only does this increase your search engine optimisation on these terms, but it also provides the searching visitors with what they are looking for.

When you start to write far more targeted material your readers will come back more often and find you a bigger wealth of information. Hopefully, some will digg your posts and share on Facebook and Twitter and so on.

In all, use your statistics packages to see what your visitors want to read, provide it and hopefully see your traffic going up.

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22 Jul

Should you look at hits, page views or unique visitors. What are bounces? Is it important to review how people are visiting your site and the browsers that they are using? How many more questions can you ask about traffic stats?

Website traffic stats can, at best, be a little confusing. What is the huge difference between hits, page views and unique visitors? Which is most important and what should you look at and how do you interpret and analyze web traffic views?

Hits, Page Views and Unique Visitors
Three simple terms that people often confuse! Hits are usually the count of the individual files that have been accessed on your website, so a single page load could include the html, several images and a css file or two.

Page views should be self explanatory - the number of pages that have been accessed by your visitors.

And unique visitors is the number of different people visiting your website, hopefully tracked over a decent time period so that people that come back each day and each week still only count as one.

Which of these is important?
Ignore hits - these are only usually available through server stats anyway, not through the major third party reporting. But page views and unique views need to be looked at together.

Ideally you want both figures to be high and depending on the size of your site there should not be a 1 : 1 relationship. The higher page views is compared to unique visitors the more pages each individual visitor is looking at. If this ratio is high, people are coming onto your site, finding it interesting and looking around. If it is 1 : 1, either you are a single page website or they are not interested in the site.

Obviously, the higher the unique visitors figure the more people that are visiting the site and that is certainly good! It is also interesting to look, if you can, at how long a time period visitors are returning over. Are you building a relationship with them so that they keep coming back?

Bounces And Time On Page
This is something else to look at and study carefully. A high number of bounces means that a lot of your visitors are reading one page and then leaving the website. Either they get what they want off that landing page, or they don't like the site or its information. Time on the page should tell you which. If they are there for seconds then they don't like the site, if they are there for long enough to read the page and digest it, then they are getting what they want.

Different Browsers
You should also look at the different browsers that people are using to view your website and see if any particular browsers have higher / lower bounce rates than other browsers. If one has a particularly high bounce rate then it could be a sign that there is a problem with that browser displaying a page properly. Likewise, does looking at people with different version of flash or javascript enabled show different bounce rates, if you are using either of them?

This is just a basic starter list of a few thing to look at when you try to interpret and analyze web traffic views. There are lots more, but follow these and take actions and you might just increase your traffic.

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