Is your website like a lost little kitten?
Small, weak, unable to fight for it’s territory?
It is a familiar tale (or tail…).
The main reason websites are like cute but defenceless kittens is simple. Their owners do not know how to nurture them and make them grow strong.
The amount of people who spend literally hundreds of hours setting up a website, but who then give up and abandon it within the first 3 months I would estimate is something around 50%. That is a LOT of people wasting their time, creativity and valuable time on this planet creating something utterly worthless to themselves or anyone else.
So why do people do it in their thousands every single day?
Mostly it is because the decide to strart a site on “X” and they just start building, never looking further ahead than uploading it. Once they upload it they wait a week and then wonder why they are not getting any traffic (visitors) to the site.
So they go off and search and read forums and they read about “SEO”, “link building” and “internet marketing”. They realise that setting-up a site if less than half the battle. Just like a kitten, their site needs nurturing and feeding constantly so it can be strong enough to grab some SERP territory.
Many people do not realise that it can take 6 months for their new site to gain trust in Google and to start ranking naturally. They do not realise that they need to generate constant fresh links to their pages. They do not realise that their content needs to grow steadily and be of value to people. Looking cool or cute is not enough!
If you want to get more traffic to your website, for free, then you need to understand the basics of SEO – search engine optimisation.
It falls, very basically, into two parts, on-page and link building. There is no such thing as “off page” optimisation, no matter what some people say. You cannot optimise something beyond your control, all you are doing is trying to weight things slightly in your favour – usually through building links.
On-page is simply a relevant title and relevant text. Do your keyword research so you understand what is relevant to your main theme, and write to include those keywords and terms in a natural manner. Really that is as simple as on-page gets. Yes you can add stuff into your meta description and keyword tags, but the main relevance in the eyes of Google will be through good quality, topically relevant content )(for more info on topical relevance see the chapter in the Link Builders Bible 2010).
By now it should be clear that getting traffic to your site is most of the battle. Apart from writing content and building links to it, you should understand that:
- You need to write relevant content and get people to link to it.
- You need to write great great headlines and submit them to social media sites.
- You need to do press releases.
- You need to contact relevant sites and do co-promotions.
- You need to understand and create “linkbait” all the time.
- You need to be active on relevant forums with a compelling signature link.
- You need to build a mailing list through offering free content for signing-up.
- You need to provide an RSS feed.
- You need to consider your advertising options, both free (exchanges) and paid (for example Google adwords).
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And you need to stick at it for a year. Getting more traffic to a website, strong, constant, loyal traffic , takes TIME and EFFORT. You need to build relationships with your readers through providing quality content, and ways for them to interact with you and each other (blog comments for example or site forums etc).
Sticking up a site about iphones, covering it adverts and then expecting it to make money instantly is just beyond naive these days. Become an expert, provide expert content and opinion and try to be first with news.
Most traffic you get will be free, other than your time. So make the most of your time and do not give up. The answer to the question how do I get more traffic to my website for free is simple:
Learn, complete, repeat.
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