The Traffic Conundrum

Extract from my eBook "Online business marketing"

If you recognize that traffic is the key to success online, then this is where your journey takes an uphill slant. However, there is really nothing more complicated to this process than taking a systematic approach and accept that it is going to take some persistence and work. At least, this is so if we ignore some of the fancy claims made by those who sell the latest wiz-bang traffic systems with promises of thousands of site visitors within a day or two.

For clarity of purpose, this chapter discusses some generic issues related to attracting traffic to your website. You can skip this chapter if you have sufficient knowledge of keywords, page rank, on-page and off-page ranking factors and link profiles. The next chapter "Optimizing and promoting your website" describes specific processes for acquiring traffic, this chapter only attempts to place those processes into perspective.

Your challenge

It is your ability to generate traffic and convert that traffic to buyers that will allow you to run a successful online business. A high traffic volume to your site comes from a high page rank, especially in Google.

You need to have a good understanding of how search engines work. Google is dominant with a market share between 60-70 % depending which country we refer to. Its market share in the U.S. is reportedly in excess of 70% with Bing/Yahoo sharing around 20-25%. A rapidly rising star on the horizon is YouTube, now considered the 4th major search engine that attracts a very high volume of traffic.

Given this scenario, you can see that it is essential to achieve a high page rang in Google. The first thing to recognize is that Google is a computer program that uses a very large number of algorithms – reportedly somewhere in the region of 200 – to determine page rank for specific keywords.

Keywords again

As discussed in the previous chapter, search engines work in keywords (search phrases) so let me first clarify the relationship between keywords, search engines and your website.

Keywords reside in your site content, search phrases are what users enter in order to find specific information. Search engines use the search phrase to display a listing of sites that are optimized for keywords that match a specific search phrase.
Page rank is WHERE the search engine displays your site in response to a specific search phrase. It is essentially your place in a specific queue.
There is no such thing as “universal” page rank. Your site will have a page rank for a specific keyword.
Page rank for specific keywords are competitive. For this reason, it is easier to achieve page rank for “long tail keywords” (see previous chapter).

Page rank

How does Google's computer algorithms determine page rank? Nobody but Google can answer that question fully and they are not going to reveal that information other than in general terms. So, a discussion on this topic largely depends not only who you talk to but also when you ask this question. Search engine technology is evolving at an exponential rate and even experts have difficulty in keeping up with the changes. I am certainly less than qualified to answer the question, so I will restrict myself to describing what is currently known in the marketplace.

Firstly, why is page rank so important? As stated above, it is your place in a search listing for a specific keyword. It is generally accepted that people who search for information using a search engine like Google will seldom, if ever, go beyond the first couple or three pages of listings. In fact, it is worse than so. Some fifty percent of people will click on the first site listed on the first page, and the click-through rate for sites listed lower on the first page will drop away exponentially. How then do you achieve a page one ranking?

It is generally accepted that on-page optimization carries a ranking factor between 20-30% and that off-page factors count for 70-80% of your rank position.

Beyond the essential task of optimizing your site for specific keywords, it is largely a popularity contest, a vote of confidence expressed by other sites that link to your site. The more authoritative, popular and relevant the site, the higher its link value.

The importance of your link profile

Links to your website is possibly the most controversial, challenging and difficult task. It may also be your most important task for achieving a high page rank.

If you still think that your link profile depends on obtaining reciprocal links with other sites, you are well out of date. Experts state that reciprocal linking is no longer driving much of any rank. Better techniques include:

Video marketing.
Article marketing, blog entries and blog comments.
Social media tools and social marketing.
Social bookmarking techniques.
Participation in Q & A sites like Yahoo Answers.
Viral marketing involving techniques like distributing eBooks, videos or audio products.
Directory submissions.
Advertising across different online networks.

All of these activities point to the fact that you need to socialize and participate on media platforms where information related to your niche market are exchanged and discussed.

All these techniques allow you to plant links back to your website, but I did say this may be challenging and difficult, so what are the issues? The problem lies in the fact that there's more to links than just links.

It is assumed that Google may rank links as follows:

What does a link rank for (what keyword queue)?
What site carries the link?
How are they linking?

We now need to look at keyword specific links and this means links that carry your targeted keywords as the link anchor text. Let us illustrate this with an example. Assume that your are targeting the keyword phrase “antique garden furniture”. A correctly formatted link within a paragraph should then look something like this:

<p>When decorating your patio, you may be interested in looking at <a href=”www.gardenfurniture.com/antiques.htm”>antique garden furniture.</p>

The text written in red is the link anchor text. You can see that this link directly targets your keyword and is far more valuable than a link than a link that says “you may be interested in looking at my website”, where the term “my website” bears no relation to your targeted keyword. Let me restate this as a definite guideline:

Procure links that point to your website using the phrase or keyword that you want to rank well for as the link anchor text.

To drive home this point, let me rephrase it like this:

If website rank depends on links, then keyword specific rank is dependent on keyword specific links”.

Credited to Brad Callen of www.seolinkvine.com

Now, there's a mantra you can mumble to yourself as you are trying to switch off and go to sleep!

But there are more issues to consider. It is perfectly easy and permissible to distribute identical articles or blog posts that carry identical links to 50 or 100 different blogs or article directories but it won't do you much good. There is information floating around claiming that Google penalizes duplicate content. This is apparently not so. What is apparently more correct is that Google will not credit identical links placed within identical content from multiple sources. They will instead evaluate and choose the most relevant link source and ignore the others. What does this mean for you? You need to vary the content you distribute to different blogs or directories.

Links also need to be relevant. If you target a keyword phrase like “rapid weight loss” and procure back links from "plumbing suppliers", Google's search engine algorithm may just feasibly decide to rank your site under the heading "bathroom fittings".

In summary, you need to become a content contributor in order to acquire a link profile and a prominent page rank for your chosen keywords. I will talk more about processes that involve article marketing, blog posting and commenting, social medial platforms and social bookmarking in the next chapter.