How to Get Traffic to a New Website
Since I’m taking off this week, heading over to Lithuania, Austria, and Denmark, I wanted to leave you with some homework, showing you how to get traffic to a new website.
Summer school is in.
I asked Rick Porter to give you the 3 most important things you should do when setting up a new site.
Now even if you have well-established sites, it’s possible you’ve neglected these first steps.
And when you put Rick’s tips to work, you should get more traffic – without spending any money or doing affiliate deals.
Over to you Rick…
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3 Things You Must Do When Starting A Website
By Rick Porter
In the last 2 years I’ve put up nearly 200 websites testing different site structures, templates, and linking strategies.
With that I have been able to analyze a lot of data and come to some simple practices I use when setting up blogs.
Here are a few steps and recommendations you can take to get a strong start with your site.
1) Use an SEO-friendly WordPress template
The simple theme I prefer to use is called Heatmap Theme because it has been setup by the developer with SEO and internet marketing in mind.
It is a clean theme that is very scalable. You can put banners and widgets just about anywhere on the sidebars, footers, and in content of articles.
It is also a great theme to use for monetization and blogging.
There is a free version you can download and a paid version for only $70, well worth the investment. You can check out the site for more details on the bells and whistles you get with the paid version.
2) Add the right content to your new site
It’s important you start off with outstanding content that sets you up as an authority for your topic.
Remember, the web has been cranking for over a decade now and there might be tens of millions of articles on your topics.
So here is a really easy way to set yourself apart from the crowd right away…
MEGA TIP #1: Create articles with over 1,000 words.
That might seem long but when you see how many millions of short, spammy 200 to 300 word articles are out there on the internet you’ll quickly see why Google values longer content.
I can get on page 1 for just about any keyword within a week as long as I have a few articles between 1000-1500 words.
Google rewards that.
If long content is too much work then you need to find someone to write it for you.
Fortunately, all of your articles don’t need to be that long.
For your main keywords that have a LOT of competition, you’ll need longer articles.
For long-tail, low competition keywords you can have 500 to
800 word articles that link back into the longer articles.
MEGA TIP #2:
To create a really strong website that gets lots of SEO traffic, you want great content that interlinks together creating a great user experience.
To get an idea of what Google considers a “good user experience”, take a look at some Wikipedia entries.
It’s a clean menu, not cluttered with advertisements, and when you are reading an article it is packed with words that link to other articles.
For example, say you are reading an article on ‘bodyweight exercises’. Where it mentions ‘squats’, there will be a link from ‘squats’ to a separate new page devoted entirely to the squat exercise.
This ‘inter-linking’ between articles on your site is the best way for the user to flow naturally from article to article gathering all the information they need.
Google likes that set-up.
It’s up to you how deep you want to go with the information.
Wikipedia was a genius idea because the information proliferates on it’s own as users add more pages to the site.
It would have been impossible for one blogger to create it.
NOTE: It doesn’t matter if the information is 100% accurate or ‘the best content’ because Google has not yet become self aware with the ability to think and make decisions at that level…but give it a few more years and Skynet, I mean Google, will probably be judging articles.
BOTTOM LINE:
Small sites with 8-10 long articles can produce steady traffic, but it’s good to put up a new article once every 2-3 weeks to continue to promote the blog. 0
Keep it alive and the traffic will keep coming.
Make sure your most important keywords can be quickly and easily clicked. If it takes several clicks to find an article then Google will give it low importance.
Google judges the importance of that article and keyword by how quickly it can get to it from its search spiders.
3) Promote your site and get it indexed in Google
I recommend surrounding your site with a social media prescience. Those are some of the easiest back-links to get and they come from high authority sites (i.e. Youtube).
Set up accounts on the following sites and create a complete profile and a link back to your site.
Youtube – Create a profile, put your links, upload a couple videos about your niche.
Twitter – Set up your blog with a plugin to automatically tweet all of your posts.
Facebook – Set up a profile. Be detailed and make it unique so it has content about your niche. Add links to your site.
Blogger/Google – Create a Google profile. It must be over 100 words or they will not index your profile.
This goes for all profiles out there. If you simply put your name and a link there really isn’t anything unique there that Google will find value to index, which means your back-link will not be indexed and counted.
Linkedin – Set up a profile. Be detailed and make it unique so it has content about your niche. Add links to your site.
**There are many many more….
You can make things easier by creating a simple automatic syndication system.
Set up an account on Ping.fm, PixelPipe, Hellotext, and Status.net
These services allow you to integrate all of your social media accounts into one place so that when you write a new post it automatically goes out to all of them.
Either spend a couple hours setting up all these accounts, or find someone on Fivvr or Elance to do it for you.
This step is very important. You must do everything possible to set yourself up as a real person on the web to give your blog authority. All these sites will give you a good backlink, and it’s better to get 100 good high PR backlinks right away then tens of thousands of junk backlinks.
BONUS Tip
Submit your RSS feed to as many directories as possible.
Your content will be picked up in news feeds and syndicated.
If you have links in your content you will find you are getting free backlinks from this syndication.
So always make sure to have links in your article that point to other pages on your site.
In Conclusion:
There is so much to do when starting off a new site, but these are some simple things to get going so that you have a clean blog with an automatic syndication system.
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I’ll return with a blog post written in English on Wednesday.
But seriously, this info will save you 6 months to a year (or
more) of struggling and trying to get traffic to your site.
Just print this and give it to an 8-year old kid, they’ll figure it out.
To your success,
Craig Ballantyne
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas Alva Edison