Examples of Increased Website Traffic

Real World Examples of Increased Traffic

"It's not sexy but it's got teeth!"
-Tom Cruise as Mitch McDeere in the movie The Firm

Below is an outline of several solid methods for improving traffic. These are not the kinds of techniques that you'll typically hear about from any guru. They don't inspire big product launches and they aren't very sexy, but they've got teeth.

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• Blogging

  OK, so blogging might, in some cases, be a little bit sexy. We know that building content is the best way to get traffic. One way to build out your content is by blogging. There are a number of bloggers who have made a very successful website largely on the efforts of their blogging.

  One such blogger is Steve Pavlina, who has an extremely successful personal development site. Many a marketer has suggested that if you blog, that you should cut your blog posts up into very small chunks. The theory is, that more posts equals success.

  This is probably true to some degree and for a couple of reasons. First, since frequency is a definite plus with the search engines, if you can post twice a week instead of once, you're better off. Second, more pages on your site equates to more Page Rank. The more weight you can add to your site in terms of the number of pages, the more internal links you'll have, and the more Page Rank you can accumulate.

  If you can take one article and make three posts out of it, that's really extending your reach in terms of frequency of posts and the building of Page Rank.

  A different approach

  Steve is a unique individual. Not surprisingly, he uses a different approach, however, and you might want to pay attention to it. Last I looked, his website, stevepavlina.com, gets over 1 million visitors a month. He often makes, by blogging standards, extremely long posts.

  You may have heard that content is king, and Steve proves that out. Some people, however, are turned off by wordy pages on the web, but this has worked extremely well for him. By his own admission, his success is largely the result of our next example... using content.

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• Building Content

  Building content is the foundation for free traffic. After all, there's not much point in sending visitors to your site if you don't have anything to show them, right? In theory, building more content means an improvement in traffic.

  Why?

  Give the spiders (and the people) what they want

  For one, the more pages you have, the more links and page rank you can accumulate. For another, the more Web pages you have, the more that can be indexed at the engines. For another, the more words you have on your website, the more "hooks" you'll have in the engines. In other words, spider food.

  Three dramatic examples of building increased website traffic through content are About.com, Wikipedia, and again, Steve Pavlina as I mentioned above.

  About.com and Wikipedia have huge sites, and rank high on Google for too many phrases to even guess at. The sheer volume of pages and words, and the weight of both of these sites with respect to linking and page rank is a testament to the effectiveness of content building.

  With hundreds of articles and blog posts, and more recently, a forum, Steve Pavlina also has a very large site, especially for an individual. Again, his success is largely due to buiding good, linkable content.

  The best content building tool I know of is SBI! SBI! takes you from concept to implementation and teaches you the correct way to build a content site. I highly recommend it.

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• Article Marketing

  In less than a year, Sean Mize used article marketing to go from earning less than a couple hundred dollars per month, to over $10,000 USD per month. The crazy thing is, instead of using articles to send people to a content site for more information. He instead sends them to a lead capture page, also known as a "squeeze page." He then begins to market to those people through email.

  It's only been recently that he's changed his site to include some information available to the public at large. Even then, his articles section, as of this writing, only links to his articles elsewhere on the web. I supposed that makes sense. After all, the point of those articles is to bring people to the site. Even so, he's got over 26,000 backlinks to his site, and it's a PR 4. Article marketing works! Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

  Would you like to learn a simple, workable approach to increased website traffic through article marketing? On my blog I'm sharing my system for article marketing success.

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• Internal Linking

  Internal linking is one very overlooked concept by many webmasters. While many focus on getting inpointing links, what is not commonly mentioned is that those inpointing links will be made much more powerful if your internal linking is solid.

  Have a look at the way the linking is done over at elitecrmsoftware.com, a content site in a competitive market. Notice, there are relatively few links in the navigation bar in order to concentrate page rank down to the rest of the site. Notice also the use of the footer to use text links to get the main pages to rank well for their respective keywords.

  Notice too that on a number of the pages, the main keyword "crm software" is often used to link to the home page. That link is often placed near the top or middle of the content. So, if a spider only happens to index half the page, it still gets some juicy keywords and the link to the home page with the anchor text.

  Even though that site currently has fewer than 200 pages and 1,000 backlinks, it appears on page one of Google for it's primary keyword, which is highly competitive. I know I would like to have a site in that position, that's for sure.

I suggest you do two things. First, decide whether or not your marketing strategy is lacking in any of the above elements and make a plan. Perhaps you need to fine tune your internal linking? Maybe you're not using articles as effectively as possible, or perhaps you want to start a blog?

Next, have a look at your competitor's sites, and see if they're using any of these techniques. How has their use of these techniques increased wesite traffic for them? Or are they not implementing them correctly? Can you learn from them and then improve?

If you keep an eye out, you'll start to spot these and other methods, and quickly learn to do them better than your competitors.