Without traffic you can have the best site in the world and never make a penny. There are a few ways to drive traffic through a site, but for ours we are going to focus on good old fashioned SEO. After all, who doesn’t like free traffic? I know what you are thinking..“Oh no!SEO?!Backlinking?!”
Look, whatever animal Google decides to name its newest algorithm update (Panda,Penguin,etc.) If you have a diversity of quality links you really shouldn’t have anything to worry about.
While there are a ton of “programs” out there that you can buy all claiming to drive “hungry” or “thousands” of people through your site every day. They all promise the same thing, what they deliver is usually nothing.
DON’T BUY ANY TRAFFIC GENERATING SOFTWARE!!!!
Two ways to do your sites SEO:
You can either do it yourself or outsource it. Both ways will have their own advantages and disadvantages.
Outsourcing SEO
Outsourcing SEO can save you hours of work a day but will cost you money. Yet, going this route can have its challenges as well. Finding a reputable SEO provider takes a little time. I had a project going with a SEO “Expert” that took the better part of 6 months. At the end of the 6 months my site was no better in the search rankings then where I started. I cancelled the job and requested my money back.. Did I get it? Nope. Point of the story… do your homework on who you are hiring. You can talk with some SEO providers on the Warrior forum and see if someone can help you out. I would stay away from Freelance places for these (Freelancer, Fiverr, etc.) I just have never had any luck hiring SEO providers from these sites.
Do the SEO work yourself.
Yeah, it’s a grind, but sometimes if you want something done right you have to do it yourself. Yet, where do you begin?
This is my personal method of Backlinking /SEO. I’m sure some “gurus” could pick it apart, but it’s fairly simple has proven to provide me withresults. After I complete each review I will bookmark them to around 8 or so top bookmarking sites. The keyword I will be targeting will be model specific. So in our previous example I would be going after “Weber Q100”. I am bookmarking the actual page of the review, not the homepage for the site. Make sure to vary your anchor text so that maybe 30% of your links are the keyword. The rest will be click here’s, the actual url, or related keywords.
Once I have my inner pages bookmarked, I will maybe add another 10-20 backlinks from various sources to each inner page.
As soon as my inner pages start to get indexed, etc. I switch over to creating a Facebook page for the business. This doesn’t work with every niche however. I mean, you aren’t going to get a ton of “likes” if you run a toilet review website. So use your better judgment here. A Facebook page that has a ton of likes can be an awesome traffic source. As far as the home page, I handle it a bit differently.
I will usually purchase a PRWeb press release and use my main generic keywords in the links of the press release. Now, it is not necessary to buy a PRWeb release seeing as to they are a little pricey, it is just what I do. There are plenty of free press release sites across the net that will still provide plenty of exposure.
Submit your site to the DMOZ directory; JoeAnt.com is a great site to submit to if you wants to spend the $39.99
Backlinking Your Homepage
How do you find quality backlinks? Well, I “de-construct” what my competition has already done. I will look up the top 10 sites and see if I can get a backlink from the same places they do.
How do you do this?
Simple! Get a free account at Ahrefs.com. Here you can plug in a competitors website and see where they have backlinks and what the value of each backlink is. You can also see their anchor texts, etc. What I do issearch through these sites and see if I can get a link with these places as well. I do this in the same way as above with varying anchor texts, etc.
As soon as I start gaining some traction and seeing some visitors, my goal switches to getting these people to “like” my associated Facebook page. A Facebook page with real likes is just as powerful as an email list if you know how to use it.
Basically, you should do as much “getting the word out” as you can. I plan to start incorporating YouTube reviews into the mix as another traffic source heading into the future.
You want to always be trying to get more traffic and create new traffic sources. If you can get 1000 people a day to your site from 10 different traffic streams you will be way further ahead. This way when Google does some new algorithm change it won’t crush your income as if you were just relying just Google itself.
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