How to Increase Your Web Site’s Traffic

Traffic can really make or break your website.
If you crank out piece after piece of great content, yet no one reads it, it can be demoralizing. (This, I think, is why most bloggers quit after a few months.)
If you have a great product or service that you know can help a lot of people, but no one knows about it, and you’re on a limited budget, it can seem impossible to get your business off the ground.
I understand. I’ve been in both of those places, and in both of those cases, traffic can help. Today, I’ll take you “behind the scenes” and show you one of the big ways I grew a business in a highly competitive industry to the $1 million mark, and also how I grew this blog to one that gets massive traffic every month–in the top 0.1% of all websites by traffic, according to Alexa.
Then I’ll show you how you can do the same thing…and grow your business by leaps and bounds without killing your wallet by buying advertisements.

The Big Myth: Just Write Great Content, and the Search Engines Will Love You

This big myth gets uttered all the time. It might have been true years ago. The theory behind this is, interestingly, never explained. Basically, it goes like this: Good content gets links from other sites. Those links count as “votes” for that content, which naturally drives your content to the top of the search engines for relevant terms.
There are all sorts of holes in this theory. The biggest problem is that most content creators really haven’t matched their content to what people are searching for in Google or other search engines. You can write a really awesome article about the best hotels for people traveling with dogs, but if your article title is “How Cutesi the Chihuahua and I Traveled the Country In Style”, well, no one will find it through Google because no one is searching for those words!
So, the first step in getting Google and other search engines to recognize your content as “good content” and send you free traffic is to title your blog posts and home page appropriately. Use the free Google Keyword Tool to find what people are searching for in Google, and target those phrases.
The second step is to get backlinks.

Getting Backlinks

What are backlinks? Backlinks are simply a link from another site to your site. You might have heard that links are important, but the real key is the anchor text: the text people use in their links back to your site.
That anchor text on the other site counts as a “vote” in Google for that phrase, for your site. Here’s a real-world example: This site is named Erica.biz. So, when someone links back to my site, they often use the text erica.biz. The link looks like this: erica.biz
Unfortunately, this is nearly worthless for me in Google, because Google is counting this as a vote for the keyword “erica.biz”. I’m already ranked #1 for that keyword. Even worse, people typing in that keyword already know who I am, so it’s not a great keyword to optimize for.

Posted in: Google Money