Web development, design, and site optimization

I often have conversations with clients about keywords. I usually start my conversations off with “what keywords do you want to be found for on search engines?”. Nearly 100% of customers will list keywords which, though they do accurately describe the business, are so common that competition on them is very tough.

The tip I always preach is you need to think about how your customer potentially would come to search for you. Because most who search the web start off searching for one term and then continually refine their search. If you can figure out what people start off searching for, you increase your chances of reaching them.

Here is a sample for you to help illustrate my point.

Flower Store Inc: Just your typical small business. Has a brick-and-mortar business and an online site as well. In my experience, this customer might focus purely on keywords like - flowers, bouquets, florist, etc.

All very good keywords but look at these numbers as far as number of search results for each:

flowers - over 30 Million pages returned in a Google search

bouquets - over 13 Million pages returned in a Google search

florist - over 27 Million pages returned in a Google search

Probably a big source of revenue for flower shops are Weddings. How many brides and grooms go into their weddings blindly? Not many that I know. I think a common search might be:

wedding preparation - it has just over 400 thousand pages returned on Google

Another big contributor might be funerals, how about:

planning a funeral - it has just over 315 thousand pages returned in Google.

Do you see where I am going with this? The searcher likely is in need of flowers but is not directly searching for the traditional flower shop terms.

While I won’t get into as much detail with this example, think of a company selling mattresses. Will you reach more customers by focusing on keywords that include brand names or is it better to focus on something abstract like back pain? You know someone researching the web for back pain terms, is likely a good candidate for a new mattress as well.

Hopefully this makes sense to you and you can put this insight to use and see improved results in your monthly traffic and sales conversions.

I know you have likely thought to yourself “what keywords are XYZ targeting for their internet marketing campaigns” and just how much money are they  dishing out for a keyword on something like Google Adwords? Heck, I bet you wonder all the time how much they are spending each day on paid search.

Well maybe something like KeywordSpy is the tool for you. Enter a domain and it will give you the domain’s approximate search budget along with targeted key phrases.

It’s invaluable information when scoping out competitors.

Searching the web for more information I found that this company is a little shady in its marketing practices, resorting to spam-like practices. Whether or not that is the case, I cannot say for sure. Take a look at the tool and let me know what you think or what you have heard of them.

So are you always toying with new things to try and boost your traffic with little if any results? I don’t even know why I ask you this question, because I already know the answer for 95% of you.  Myself I have tried many, many tactics. Many were dumb ideas in hindsight and saw no return. A few though have in fact succeeded. Which falls right in line with some advice which appears to be universally shared amongst knowledgeable SEO professionals I have met over the years. If you stay persistent and toss up as many ideas as possible, your bound to hit one or two that work once and a while. Much like a baseball player who is considered good at what he does if he succeeds only 1/3 of the time.

Without much doubt, the most successful method of increasing traffic to my blog has been through the use of Social Media. I have been using a combination of Twitter.com, Facebook.com, and most recently EzineArticles.com.

*A word of caution, I strongly recommend you have a solid site content wise before you head down this path. Driving traffic to your site is useless unless you have compelling content to keep them there and keep them coming back.

1. Twitter.com - When I first started using twitter I simply followed people whom I already knew. This worked ok for a while. However I then got an idea on how I could leverage this as more of a tool to drive traffic. I did two things. First I used Twitterfeed.com to automatically post headlines of my latest blog posts to Twitter. Second I went out and scoped some famous “techie” twitter folk with lots of followers, I then started to add myself as a follower of as many of these followers as possible. The direct result is that I got many, many reciprocal follows. Best of all these are people who enjoy the type of material that I blog about.

Now on a daily basis my followers increase. Today I have 687 followers. I engage in conversation with them, I comment on their blogs if they have them, I also have setup link exchanges with some of them. all in all this is the biggest driver of traffic to my website.

2. Facebook.com - Within Facebook I have setup an RSS application that automatically shows my blog feed in my profile. That way anyone who visits my profile, can see my latest posts. This is limited to my immediate Facebook friends, about 334 in total.

In addition to this I have just setup a Facebook Fan Page where users can become a fan of DropTheMike and also can view the RSS feed there and meet other fans.

3. EzineArticles.com - This was recommended to me by a friend in the SEO business. I write and submit articles (minimum 250 words) which are posted to the site in an appropriate category. Site visitors can then read and re-distribute. The great thing is that you can embed links back to your site or blog.

Since doing these 3 items My traffic has been consistently going up and up. One benchmark I like to use is Alexa.com. Before starting these tree tactics I was around the 1 million traffic rank mark. As of today I am nearing 600,000.

Previous notable post on social media:

building-personal-brand-within-the-social-media-landscape/

online-marketing-budgeting-what-next/

entrecardcom/ (I am testing this again)

In running a blog you need to continually benchmark yourself. Whether you use one or many methods of doing so is not important as long as you are consistent with the tools that you use. Myself, I use AWStats, Google Analytics, and Alexa.com. Oh and recently I also added to the mix WebsiteGrader.com although this is more of a consolidation of things like Google Rank and Alexa rank just to name a few.

As of this post, my rank on Alexa is: 693,06262

That places dropthemike.com in the top 2.17 % of all websites.

What other useful information does Alexa provide me?

How about where my users are from:

Being Canadian I am surprised that Canada is listed only as the third most popular source country for visiting my site. I can also see my traffic rank within specific countries. Apparently Dropthemike.com is big in Tanzania :)

When I first got into blogging, like many I stumbled across the blog of the famous John Chow. Famous for being a supposedly wealthy blogger as a result of his blog (s). At the time I did find some use in a number of his post. Some rubbed me the wrong way and left me thinking he must be bogus and just full of himself.

While I don’t question the fact that he has made blogging a main source of his income, I do question just how much he says he makes. But that is not the point of my post today. At the end of the day I do have some respect for the work he has done.

I visited his blog again for the first time in months and came across one of his latest post. This post reminded me of why I stayed away in the first place, he seems to push one “scam” after another. Sprinkled in between these scams he has some good post though, which is unfortunate, because I have and will continue to miss them due to hating to weed through the crap.

In his post he is essentially pushing a $400.00 “Traffic Secrets” course. Obviously he is getting some sort of bounty off this. The whole this looks like a sham.

I posted the following comment to the article.

“Looks like more BS to me. They will not get my hard earned cash. I don’t get how these types of programs actually have an legs or get any traction. The site looks like a scam, it looks like all the other scam sites.

Like with anything else, work hard, be patient and persistent, and you will eventually see results. It won’t be overnight like some will make you believe is possible. But in the long run it will be worth it and you will likely have a better understanding of both yourself and the running of your website.”

I checked today to see how much John Chow fanboy reactions I got. To my suprise I got none, in fact i saw other comments that more or less echoed what I said.

Read the entire post here: http://www.johnchow.com/the-next-level-with-traffic-secrets-20/