by Colm on December 23, 2008
I’ve been working on a small personal website for 3 months now. I started the website on September 22nd and yesterday it’s hit just under 10,000 visits for the past 30 days that works out at 333 people a day not bad for a website that’s 90 days old.
Now don’t get me wrong it’s been hard work getting this type of traffic but it’s all free traffic from the search engines and if I can do it so can you.
I’m not going to reveal the website, Just to let you know I’m using wordpress as the main CMS which is a great bit of software. So what’s the secret to getting this traffic so quickly on a new website.
First is content, I’ve been adding anywhere from 3 posts to 10 posts per day. It’s a matter of getting into a routine when doing this. Adding an article first thing in the morning, adding one or two at lunchtime and then adding maybe a couple in the evening.
I use Google Reader and have feeds from various on topic websites, that way the news and updates are pushed to me so save lots of time searching for information. Now don’t get me wrong I have been researching and one of these paid off with links from a couple of very highly placed websites in the niche linking back to my post as a reference of the news (nice backlink and a little bit of traffic).
I’ve also been working on backlinks, not as hard as I should to be honest but this will be the key focus on this site over the coming months.
If you read some of the other articles on this site I do a lot of article marketing and distribute quality articles to quality websites and try get a backlink to my sites.
The next target is 100,000 per month, I think it might take a little longer but it’s very achievable if you add quality content and quality backlinks and give Google what the searchers are looking for.
by Colm on October 16, 2008
by Colm on October 4, 2008
I’m sure you know this already that linking is one of the most important components of increasing traffic to your web site.
Here are a few tips to help get you started
1. If you sign a contract with a company put into the agreement that they link to your website. I see this all the time with web development companies that will almost always leave a link on their customers website.
2. Start a Blog - Blogs are a great way to get links. But be careful don’t try to sell anything from your blog keep it non-commercial or low. You can find tones of information on blogs from an SEO point.
3. Submit your site to quality directories, not crappy little one. The like of Yahoo, Best of the Web, Business.com are what you really need to think about.
4. Ask for links - Yep it’s simple really just email relevant website and ask them to link to you.
5. Pick up the phone - You would be surprised how simple and easy this is. This can work in two way they can give you a free link (or not) or you can suggest you write a quality article for their website and they give you a little credit within the article that links back to your website.
6. Ask your visitors to link back to your website (if your reading this and want to link to me please do - I’m a nice guy …really) the important thing here is not to have message all over your website with link to me everywhere.
7. Promote your site using conventional PR, PRWeb is good and if you have a marketing department where you work ask them for leads.
by Colm on September 8, 2008
So 10 years ago two guys started this small company with a backing of $100k and a few computers, 10 years later the company is worth a few billion (maybe $150 billion).
I wonder how many millionaires Google has made and how many companies have started and succeeded on the back of Google success.
If like me your trying to succeed in your online business lets hope we are part of the success that Google now has.
by Colm on August 29, 2008
Trying to find quality links can be very tedious and extremely time consuming, I’m two months into a small project and just seem to be hitting a brick wall until this week.
One issue could be the time of year July/August just seems to be so slow.
Is everybody on holidays?
I like quality links – I’m sure we all do
I do lots of article marketing, and before you ask it’s not all article directories. I write quality articles or I hire a quality writer to write maybe a 1000 word article on the subject I’ll sometimes get 10-20 articles done.
I’ll then contact website owners and ask if they are interested in publishing an article on their website, letting them know of course that this article will NOT appear on any other website and is an exclusive article for them.
Now how good is that for a website owner!
Free article
Free content
Quality article
Quality written
This of course is slow and takes time, I finally got one reply yesterday after 2 months waiting to let me know the article was published. Lucky I waited and didn’t use the article on another website.
Was it worth the wait? Hell yeah it’s a quality website
So I guess the lesson is you really need to have self belief that what you are doing is working and maybe as we move into winter more people will be online and might find time to publish your articles.
by Colm on August 20, 2008
I run a number of personal websites and I get link request e-mails on a fairly regular basis. I’ve included a sample of an e-mail below that hit my e-mail box today.
There are very few fundamental mistakes in this e-mail, these guys will probably send out thousands of requests on a daily basis and don’t even check the websites they are requesting links from.
From: ++++ +++++ [+++++++++@gmail.com]
To: Webmaster
Subject: Get Quality Home Page Link
Hello,
We visited your site http://www.++++++++++.com and are interested to swap links with your site.
We would add your link at the home page of http://giprimex.com/ which will actually help to increase the search engine rank of your site and give you some
targeted traffic too.
We’d appreciate a link back from the home/internal page of your site for
the mutual benefit.
If you are interested please reply to this email with your link details.
We look forward for your positive response.
Best regards,
++++ +++++
For starters my website does not relate to the subject, I usually don’t reply to any requests from a free e-mail account like Gmail or Hotmail etc. they say that the link will actually helped increase the search engine ranking and give me some traffic I really don’t think this will happen.
At the time of this post they have a page rank of 2, which is not a major problem as a page rank is overstated, as we’ll talk about in later posts. I don’t do much reciprocal linking (I do some) reciprocal linking to a site that is not related in any way simply does not work in 2008.
by Colm on August 19, 2008
It kind of depends on what you mean by directories is it the likes of Yahoo or is it one of the many hundreds of directories that you will find all over the web. The problem with some of these directories is nobody’s ever heard of them and they have little chance of ever being found.
So best practice comes down to the type of site you have, if its a brand-new website that has just been launched for the first-time ‘then you basically have nothing to lose and may pickup a few good links along the way but don’t expect great results.
If however you’re running a campaign for rte.ie that has good ranking then you are basically wasting your time, as there is zero value in submitting this to the 1000 directories that you can find. I mean let’s look at rte.ie it’s a 12-year-old website (maybe older archive.org only go back to 1996) do you think a well-linked site is going to benefit from a few new links from these crappy little directories? I don’t think this website would even benefit from a Yahoo directory listing at this stage but that remains to be seen.
Have we asked the question? Is there such a thing as best practices? if you have a well established site that is really well linked and ranking well then submitting to directories is going to have little effect.
