Website Traffic

I am always amazed at good photo's. I try to think about what people see and think when they look at them. I have to say that I see things a little different when it comes to photos. Look at these two photos below. You may think what beautiful balloons, or what beautiful mountains. The second picture you may be saying what beautiful clocks. The two pictures may be totally different but they are the same. Can you figure it out? Can you see what I see?

My answer is 50 people using smartphones. I bet that wasn't the answer you were thinking. My next thought is how can I get my website into their pockets. Think about it a second if you were an operator of a hot air balloon wouldn't you need a smartphone for weather updates, reservation changes etc.

The woman on the cliff is probably taking a picture with her smartphone. So are the people that are in the hot air balloons. There could be up to 75 people that have a smartphone in this picture.

The photo on the right is a city picture with people hustling around. They need smartphones to stay connected. You can even see the guy in the blue shirt on the right using his. Now my question is what are you doing to get your business into peoples pockets.

Is your address on your website for local searches? If you are a local store do you have Google Maps embedded on your site. Are you using Schema mark up on your pages? Do you know what Schema markup is?

 

Starting on August 10th until the 12th, my book “25 Ways To Improve Your Website” will be free. These dates coincide with Affiliate Summit East 2014 happening in New York City.

This book is especially good for newbies to Affiliate Marketing as it can be used as a step by step guide to help you get better search rankings.

The book contains 25 easy to follow steps that will improve your website and your traffic. Some topics covered in the book are: 

Your Website Now – Keywords – Free Tools – Colors – Title Tags – Meta Description Tag – Meta Keyword Tags – Search Box – Logo – About Us Page – Blogs – Contact Us Page – Privacy Policy – Trust – Email Newsletter – Navigation – Backlinks – Images – Videos – Landing Pages – Internal Linking – On Page Content – Site Speed – Blogs in Niche – and Using Forums. 

Click here on August 10th to get the book free

A few weeks ago I noticed a huge spike in traffic on one of my sites after I posted 4 days of consecutive blog post. A few days later Geno Prussakov mentioned something along the same lines. It got me thinking what if I posted a new blog post for 30 consecutive days. What kind of traffic surge would I see? How many new email subscribers would I pick up?

At first I was thinking that I use my book that has 30 topics and is in the never ending hell that is called editing and just break it up and be done but that would be way too lazy. It also doesn't sound like much fun so even though I am sure it will be hard to come up with 30 topics off the top of my head it can be done.

I Want To Hear From You

I want to hear from you! What do you want to know? Every time I go to an Affiliate Summit Meetup here in NYC I get asked all sorts of questions. They range from SEO to email marketing to photography and I never know what the next question is going to be but I look forward to the questions.

I will be showing off some cool pictures along the way. I take way too many pictures that don't get shared enough on the web. What good is taking a picture if no one gets to see it. I am getting more and more into HDR photography and every blog post needs a good picture.

If you look at this picture of the New York subway you will see how the poles jump out at you. I can tell you how this is done. Totally of topic but odds are the 30 days of post will not be connected either as A.D.D seems to creep into my writing from day to day, just enjoy the ride.

The journey starts on Sept 1st! Make sure you are signed up for the newsletter. It will be interesting to see how many people complain about getting a daily email and unsubscribe. It will be a good experiment all the way around. Who knows maybe I will learn something.

Years ago I did an awful thing! I polluted the Internet! Just saying it makes me feel better, now on to the post.

Back in the day I was paying for articles to be written for my sites. These sites were never going to be a main site so I didn't really care if they were going to be penalized. Actually I didn't really care since they brought in a lot of money. One of my sites was my sports site that I started back in 1999 or 2000. The plan went something like this. Do some keyword research and find the best keywords, get a writer to turn out 300 word articles and get them to rank using SEO. Next week find more keywords and do the same thing.

Sounds like a simple plan and these $5 articles made their money back in a week and produced very well until April and May of this year. For ten or eleven years these $5 articles produced better than some of their competition who were trying every trick in the book to out-rank them. While I did go in throughout the years and make these articles a little better it just wasn't a passion and it seemed like work. Work I just didn't have time for.

When the Panda and Penguin penalties starting happening I saw a slight decline but didn't care since this site had produced its share already. In truth it should have been sold off a few years back. It wasn't really on my mind until I started looking at it closer a few weeks ago. I noticed that traffic was on the decline and since it was a Friday night I decided to take a closer look. I thought I would be in Google Analytics for hours when it suddenly hit me to use Raventools instead. First I had to do a little addition to the tools at Raven. I had to add to the report section all the Google changes and add them using the Profile tab.

The Events tool in Raven is one of the most important tools that I use. I use it to see traffic surges and add an event every time a newsletter goes out. For this job I would need to add all the Google updates for the last year, I got them off the SEOMoz site and loaded them into Raven as events. I then went to my Raven dashboard and loaded up my sports site. I produced a little report for last year, then a report for the first six months of the year and then from March until the present day.

My goal was to see what pages were ranking, what pages have lost ranking and what ones are still getting traffic. In my head I was going to get rid of any page that wasn't ranking or getting traffic. The site had 414 pages when I started. I figure I get rid of a hundred pages maybe since some were really outdated. Think my Cleveland Browns page still had Vinny Testaverde as the starter for goodness sake. The meta descriptions were horrible and they were all over stuffed meta keywords. I was standing out to Google as a spam site.

I printed out the reports and put them side by side and in about 5 minutes I knew what I was going to do. Last years report wasn't as good as I thought it was going to be. I had over 75 pages get less than 10 visits each and they all had about an 85% bounce rate. Without regard to navigation on the site I deleted those 75 pages. I thought I was done but in my heart I knew I wasn't even close. I started looking more closely at bounce rates and I had a few dozen pages that were at 70% with 1 visit. These were also gone.

Then I started looking at the dates of the Google changes and I noticed that the Penguin penalty of April 27th was a huge drop in traffic. I started to look at the report from the beginning of the year and I could see exactly what pages were either hit or disappeared from Google.

Many of them were the pages that were just getting about 20 visits a week. This was about 200 pages or so that after April 27th dropped to nothing at all. These were also deleted.

I then ran another report from April 24th until present day and saw that I had a few dozen pages that were getting minimum traffic. I said to myself since Google is looking at the overall quality of the site these pages were going to go also. There is no fancy 301 redirects they are just gone. Goodbye and good riddance. This left me with 14 pages of solid content that I wrote myself somewhere along the line. I find it amazing that the pages I wrote were the ones that did ok. These pages didn't over stuff, and had proper meta descriptions. Even the less used meta keyword tag only had 2 relevant tags in them.

Will the site come back to its former self? That is anyone' guess. Since I am still getting the same traffic to the the same pages I don't really care. I know have a clean website to add to it with some quality when I feel like it. Did these 400 pages affect the overall rankings on the site? I would bet that would be a yes. I know if I was a quality scorer at Google I would have marked this site as spam. It just made no sense to keep these pages.

Some pages were test pages that I had long forgotten about. Some pages were automatically generated using a script pulling in products to affiliate programs that have long since shut down. They were doing nothing but letting the search engines know I was a spam site.

If you know your site was hit by the Google Monster take a look at your analytics and see when your dropped happened by looking at the SEOMoz page. It is a good starting point to find out where your site got penalized. Knowing which update was the killer is 90% of the battle to getting your site back on track. You may not go to the extremes I did with my site but you can get a good idea how to fix your site.

I have been sitting on this post for a while now and didn't want to write it because information changes so fast that by the time I you read this the info it could be outdated. Use this info as a starting point if your website has been taken down into the Google hellhole of rankings. I know a lot of people that have suffered lately because of the Google Panda and Penguin updates, It is really a shame but that goes without saying. A lot of these people are now looking at “How to fix Panda issue” EBooks and spending money they don't have, to get answers that are bland at best. Please don't buy these books, they can't tell you anything you can't find on your own.

Here is my free 2 cents and take it for what it is worth:

After an update happens I try to think like Google and what would they like to see in their results. Not an easy thing but with every update I say to myself what is Google thinking now. I covered this in my Feedfront article last year “Was Panda Just the Beginning“. Of course I had no idea the Penguin update was going to be next and clear out the search results in what Google says is the positive way.

When Panda hit I felt a little sting to one of my sites. I didn't sit there and blame Google for that won't make your rankings go up. I went out and saw what my worst visited pages were for the year and either deleted them or added some content to them. 99% of the time the page was deleted. I then went out and got a few backlinks for some internal pages. Another thing I did was send out 5 days of consecutive newsletters. This put a steady flow of repeat traffic back on to my site. I am sure this was a number that Google was looking at. All of a sudden my visitors went from 80% new to 65% new must have told Google that my site was worthy. Changing a site to get 35% returning visitors is a major feat but can be done. Panda looked at your overall site so by improving in those areas helped get me back to where I was.

[Read more…] about Recovering From Panda and Penguin Updates

One thing that I am asked about all the time is how you get traffic to a website.

I tell people that there is no quick way and that it is a series of things that get me traffic. Most of the time a website actually hurts itself and gets penalized. I more or less find the reason why the site is not ranking well and I fix that problem first. Sometimes websites don't do basic SEO and that will hurt them. Sometimes website owners don't know what they should rank for or track what is working and what isn't. If a website owner doesn't know these answers they are missing opportunities to get traffic and money from that traffic. Getting a few links to a website and doing some social media work can come a long way when it comes to improving a website ranking and actually get traffic.

Your website needs two things, a way to track your website visitors and a way to find out what people are searching for. For tracking visitors I use Google analytics and for seeing what people are looking for I use a combination of things like the Google adwords tool and/or SEM Rush. The thing that you want to do is make really good pages that people are searching for and solve their problem. This may be by linking to your product or an affiliate site that sells it.

My goal is to make a good page that builds trust and have the user sign up for my email newsletter. Repeat traffic is easier to convert since you have built trust already. In the process I also want to build a loyal following that will come back to my site and tell their friends about it. Every website needs a few pages like about us, contact, privacy policy etc.

The about us page should be about how you are going to help the user and then some personal stuff about you. I find that making the page personal helps a lot. It shows your readers that you are real.

I will make videos for YouTube and have my website url in the description so people watching the video come to my site. I will use Twitter and Facebook also to build a following. All these things add up to traffic.

Most website owners need to get links to their website. Most have no idea how or why they need this. What I suggest is writing articles about your niche and finding other website owners to give that content to put it on their site with a link or two back to your site within the article.

You can also get links back to your site by making the best article ever and putting it on your own site and alerting the media to it. Try to get to know your local newspaper reporter and when you have news let him know. It is a good two way street to be living on.

I was just watching a special on Warren Buffett on CNBC and it showed him driving around Omaha Nebraska where he lives. I was shocked when the reporter asked him why he didn't live in New York where Wall Street is and he had a simple answer. When he said it it hit me like a ton of bricks. He said he doesn't live in New York because when he is in New York he gets 500 tips about companies to buy before noon whenever he is there.

He went on to explain that he has to do his own thinking and not rely on what others thought. He said he only needed one idea a year to make money and having too many ideas all at once would make anyone lose focus. It was then that I realized why I didn't make money on the internet when I first started out with affiliate marketing.

I was trying to be everything to everyone so to speak. I found out that car parts were sold online so I started a car parts site. Sounds like a good idea doesn't it? Yes it did until I didn't sell anything. The reason I didn't sell car parts was I got the idea from someone else and I didn't know the first thing about car parts. There was a few other reasons but that was the main one.

While I had about 25 pages up selling car parts someone said to me that since I liked boats I should start a site about selling boat motor parts. Next thing I knew I had a boat motor parts website. This kept happening over and over until I reached about 30 sites that had no focus at all. No focus = no money!

When asked why he didn't lose money in the tech stock bubble Warren had a simple answer. “Stick to what you know and what you like doing”. Sounds really simple but he didn't know anything about tech stocks so he stayed away from them. Sounds great in hindsight but he lived it and he went on to make money during the bubble bust.

When I am online I am constantly distracted by email and instant messenger and visiting forums. This time could be spent improving on what I know and what I like doing. Not spent on making another site about something I knew nothing about.

When IPods first came out I wanted an IPod website but I held myself back. I already had two websites about cell phones and I hated making pages on the latest cell phones since that took a lot of  work to research and there was a lot of competition. I practically had to sit on my hands not to register an IPod site url but I didn't do it. Everyday I am happy that I didn't as the site would just sit and spin as I call it and get no traffic. Why is that, because I don't know anything about IPods.

Do what you love and do it well. When I started shutting down websites I felt relieved that I didn't have to cover a topic I hated. You know what happened my income started to go up. I like sports so making a sports site was a no brainer and when I did that it was a success almost overnight. I can write about sports all day long and if someone pops up on instant messenger they have to wait until I am done writing the web pages before I answer them.

If Warren Buffett had to make a website what would he do. He would have one website about what he knew or liked and that's it. Focus on a topic that you like and focus only on that one topic.