Some websites have massive traffic – some have very little traffic although they haven been doing their best for years.
Sticking to one tactic to attract traffic
The company marketer has stuck with one method (like article marketing) which he has mastered and might have been very successful once, but no longer so due to addressing the same group of people over and over again.
Multiple methods and tactics are needed. Try not to depend on just one source of traffic.
Never depend solely on paid traffic either, there are always fools who don’t know what they’re doing and/or have more money to spend than you do.
Jumping tactics
Jumping from one tactic to another without waiting long enough to measure the effect.
You need to take time to measure in order to get significant results. Less measurements = less accurate results.
Moreover everything takes time on the Internet as people really aren’t waiting for you or your message.
Automated services
There are many services that can bring traffic: they show effects at first use but on the long run their system can decrease in efficiency.
Using too many of these automated web services which will replicate your original content over an over again, will result in a lower SERP (Search Engine Results Page) as your content will seem like duplicated content.
If you trick the search engines somehow, they will catch on sooner or later. And if your tricks don’t survive a manual inspection, you might get reported by your competitors.
Old content
The older your content becomes the less important is is regarded by search engines. Only when you keep getting new inbound links, and people still frequently click on your links in the serps then you’ll keep a good score on search result pages.
Probably inspired by Twitter’s popularity, fresh content is the driving force these days.
Not indexed pages
Most website have only half of their content indexed by the search engines. Unindexed content will not show up in searches and not generate traffic.
For a start create internal links between all of your pages. Not just one link on each page, but multiple links to multiple pages on each page. Make sure you have a well interlinked site. If this doesn’t seem easy, consider if such a multi-column link footer would help. They don’t interfere with your content, and people almost expect them to be there these days.
Next, try to obtain more external links. Preferably of high-authority sites. Easier said than done. According to the search engines, more external links pointing to your site = a more important and interesting site = more pages of your site will get crawled = more of your pages in the serps.
Additionally create a site map page to please the search engines: submit your xml site map to Google (WebMasterTools), Bing and Yahoo .
External links
Internal links are easy to achieve and a first step to increase your ranking. However the real challenge is in external links (backlinks or inbound links): other sites linking to yours.
This is the hard work:
- Having really interesting content, rising above the internet noise
- Persuading the others to link to you. Easier when you have interesting or remarkable content.
- Various tactics, like commenting on blogs. Often hard not to regard this as a form of spamming.
- Participating in linkwheels or buying links: frowned upon.
It’s often said by ‘SEO Experts’ (beware, a lot of these people are the modern variant of snake oil peddlers) that forged links to your site could result in a penalty from the search engines.
We seriously doubt this though. If an external, off-site factor could result in a penalty, surely lots of people would use this to bring penalties to their competitor’s sites.
Don’t think of content as only text on a webpage. Content can be anything: movies, screencasts, audiobooks, tools, games, photo’s, cartoons,…
Domain age
The older the domain the more weight it obtains in any search result.
Apparently old means trustworthy.
Moreover older content is likely to have more links than new content.
If the links don’t increase though, the content is regarded as outdated or stale which might have an averse effect.
Don’t depend on only one source of traffic. Key is having content interesting, remarkable or useful enough to get others to link to you.
