Building and Tracking Traffic Made Easy!
“Build it and they will come.”
-Field of Dreams (1989)
Talk about a “field of dreams!” If you just simply build it, your site might as well be a corn field in Iowa, visited only by ghosts!
Yes, it’s true. This course has shown you how to develop a strong Theme- Based Content site, completely loaded with HIGH-PROFITABILITY Keyword- Focused Content Pages. These pages OVERdeliver to your human readers, and at the same time, satisfy the Search Engines.
So you’re way ahead of 99% of e-business people on the Net. You have created a diamond, shining with terrific content. Does that guarantee you success?
Sorry to say... nope! Why not?
Because it’s just sitting there, buried in the middle of that huge corn field... that field of dreams.
What’s missing in your quest to build income through content... to turn that field of dreams into reality?
Traffic. Visitors who read your content, click on your links, and then do something (buy, complete a form, etc.).
Read on.
In the last chapter, we focused more on content. Now we begin to focus on building traffic to your content.
Here’s the secret to building traffic. It’s really the secret of traffic-building experts...
Do something. See how it works.
Do something else. See how that works. And then...
Yup... try something else again. And see how that works.
That means you need traffic-building tools to keep “doing things” to build traffic. And then you need the traffic-tracking tools to tell you what’s working.
A feedback loop from building to tracking is critical. One of the keys to success, any kind of success, is feedback. Good results tell you what’s going right and give you something to build upon. Poor outcomes show you what needs to be fixed.
Without tracking (i.e., feedback), you’re shooting in the dark. Without the ability to take traffic-building action and increase or change what you’re doing (depending on the traffic-tracking feedback), you’re not even shooting!
Two more important principles to add... the best traffic-building techniques are high-yielding and sustained. In other words, you must get a big traffic-return for your time-and/or-money, and it must deliver traffic in an ongoing fashion, not just be a one-shot deal.
Let’s give you an example. When you “get it right” at the Search Engines, they’ll deliver you traffic for months, even years, without you ever having to tweak your pages again... if you’ve done everything correctly.
Don’t worry – that’s not such a big if. After all -- if you have followed this course properly, you have indeed done everything right.
Compare that with making a post in an e-mail mailing list, even a high-profile one. It takes some time to prepare a good post, with great content... great enough to wow people into visiting your site. Consider what happens within two days of that post -- your traffic falls back to where it was.
So... what are the best “sustained-high-yielding” traffic- building opportunities on the Net?...
#1) The Free Major Search Engines
#2) Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
#3) The Major Directories
#4) Word of Mouth
#5) Your Own Opt-in E-zine
Yes, of course, there are other ways to build traffic...
• buying ads in, and writing articles for, e-zines
• making posts in forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, newsgroups
(depending on your niche and other circumstances, these can be fairly effective... or totally useless)
• link exchanging
• and, not to be missed, your sig file!
These lesser techniques, however, don’t deliver both big and sustained results. Sure, using a sig file is something you should do. And it’s sustained. At best, though, you send 40 or so e-mails per day, mostly to people who know you. Not much super traffic-building potential there.
Buying ads or writing articles in e-zines will bring you a 1-2 day pulse of traffic (that is, if you choose well and write an effective ad or article). But then traffic falls right back down.
Same reality goes with posts in forums, etc. Some Web-based forums remain on the Net and could be spidered, thereby counting that page as a link to your site. But we’re talking “thin” here. So...
Your best “large and sustained” traffic returns will come from the BIG 5 above. Since your time is limited, don’t try to “do it all.” Begin directly with the BIG 5.
I am not saying that you should not use the lesser traffic-building techniques. Depending on your situation, some will work very well for you. But...
Start first with the BIG 5. As you do, three things will happen...
• you’ll establish a strong, sustained traffic base
• you’ll start to feel comfortable with what you’re doing, and will view the whole concept of building traffic as a very do-able project
• you’ll come across “perfect fits” for the above, lesser traffic-building techniques (ex., a perfect vehicle for a link exchange, or an excellent e-zine that reaches your target market, etc.)
It is at this point that you can then start using the secondary techniques effectively.
OK. Back to the BIG 5. Let’s open the discussion with a look at BIG TECHNIQUES #4 and #5...
BIG TECHNIQUE #4 Word of Mouth
How do you get word-of-mouth? First piece of advice, don’t bother with those “recommend-a-friend” scripts. Less than one visitor in a thousand fills them in. There’s a far simpler way to get “word of mouth”... deliver great content.
That’s it.
Want an example? Let’s say that you have a wonderful theme-based site about succulent plants (i.e., cactus, euphorbia, etc.). You have a terrific page about all the tricks you have developed for propagating them...
Other aficionados find that page at the engines. Do you think they won’t tell friends, or forums, or cactus associations, about this terrific info?
Sure they will.
Just one more huge benefit of OVERdelivering!
BIG TECHNIQUE #5 Your Own Opt-in E-zine
Publish your own e-zine... yes, it’s extremely important. But not right now. There’s only so much that you can do in a day, so you have to do things in their proper order.
Remember, at this stage, your site is up, but there’s no traffic yet. So no one is there to sign up for your e-zine. Here’s the correct “To Do” order after you build your site.
First, get your site up and running. Then work on the first three of the BIG 5 traffic-building techniques. It will take a while for traffic to start building. But once you have some decent numbers, it only takes a day to get an e-zine up and running.
Not surprisingly, you can go the free route, or you can pay for list hosting (services that take care of all the technology of e-zine publishing).
As usual, I recommend that you pay for it. Because nothing’s really free. Yahoo!Groups does a great, and free, job...
http://www.groups.yahoo.com/
But they only insert a little ad for you in every mailing. Do you know what people think when they see that?
Small fry.
Your image is worth more than the few dollars per month that a quality list host will you. You’ll never see e-zine publishers like Ralph Wilson using anything but a top-notch service like SparkList...
http://www.sparklist.com/
Or consider Topica…
http://www.topica.com/
Either way, paid or free... From the time you decide to do an e-zine, you can be taking subscriptions in less than a day. So there’s no rush to publish your e-zine. Put up your subscription form during the lag period, when you see the first fruit of your traffic-building efforts.
Which brings us back to the first 3 of the BIG 5 TRAFFIC-BUILDING TECHNIQUES. We’ll cover these all-important strategies during DAYS 8 and 9...
#1) The Free Major Search Engines
#2) Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
#3) The Major Directories
Submit, Spider-Watch, List & Rank
Waiting and watching...
...............
Yawn!
Goal-of-the-DAY... Submit your site to the major (free) Search Engines (listed below). Get familiar with tracking... 1) spiders, 2) listing, and 3) ranking.
Ongoing Goal... Track the spiders and re-submit as necessary. Track to see when you get listed, and then track how your pages rank. Do this on a weekly basis.
With these goals in mind...
Submit, Spider-Watch, List & Rank...
Geez, sounds like a recipe of some kind, doesn’t it? Actually, it is...
First, submit your site to the engines. Then wait.
Second, keep an eye on the spiders. Wait some more.
Third, you get “indexed” (listed). Yup, a bit more thumb twiddling...
Fourth, you get ranked. Yay! People can find you. Now it’s time to improve your rankings (in DAY 8).
Let’s start at the beginning...
STEP 1) Submit Your URLs...
Submitting your site to the engines is a tedious affair, because each engine likes to receive submissions in different ways...
• they each have their own submission pages.
• some only want to receive your home page. Some let you submit every page of your site.
• some allow you to submit many pages in a day... others only one.
And, to make it all nastier... they change policies from time to time!
Still, it’s a necessary task. Yes, there are submission services and software. But, unless I really know someone, I trust important stuff like this only to myself. I’d suggest the same for you.
Luckily, a mere seven major free Search Engines account, either directly (through their own search services) or indirectly (through partner sites), for about 95% of your traffic. Let’s stay on the right side of the 80-20 Rule (actually 95-5 here!) and only submit to them.
Go to the submit URLs of the following engines and research their current submission policies. Then start submitting...
AltaVista http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl
Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html
HotBot http://www.hotbot.com/addurl.asp
Lycos http://www.lycos.com/addasite.html
Fast http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php
There is no need to submit to any other engines, not even...
AOL Search -- your listings are displayed automatically in AOL’s Search Engine when you bid on keywords at Overture (which uses Inktomi for its “backup” search results, so you’re covered when you submit to Inktomi via HotBot).
MSN Search -- you are listed automatically in MSN’s Search Engine when you submit to Inktomi. (You submit to the Inktomi index through HotBot or through the paid inclusion program available at PositionTech.com or NetworkSolutions.com.)
Netscape Search -- you are listed automatically in Netscape’s Search Engine when you bid on keywords at Overture (which uses Inktomi for its “backup” search results, so you’re covered when you submit to Inktomi via HotBot). Also, Netscape use Google as a secondary Search Engine. So you’re covered there, too. (Overture’s network partners often only display between the first and third place listings.)
You can no longer batch submit URLS to AltaVista. It has come up with a creative way to force a human to actually go the submission page in order to submit... you have to enter the 8 characters from a displayed graphic into a Submission Code box, then enter your URL and then press the Submit button.
Check it out yourself...
http://add-url.altavista.com/cgi-bin/newurl?
The big problem with all submission software? They don’t tell you the policies of each engine (i.e., how many pages are OK to submit, how often, etc.). And, of course, they don’t tell you whether you’ve been spidered, etc. So it’s easy to happily batch submit your URLs until you run afoul of the engines by violating their policies.
Is that a hand up over there?
“What would happen if I didn’t submit?”
Good question!...
Well, the engines’ spiders would get around to visiting your site sooner or... well, after you-know-what freezes over!
STEP 2) Track Engines’ Spiders...
Even after you do submit, some of the engines take weeks, even months, to send their spiders over to your site to “bring back the goodies.”
So the pros don’t wait around. They submit. Then they check their site’s log files, looking to see which of the major engine’s spiders have visited, and which pages they “took back to their mother ships.”
If they don’t see an engine’s spider within a certain amount of time after submitting (varies for each engine), they’ll resubmit, according to each engine’s acceptable limits.
Yes, tracking spiders is rather complicated, and far more tedious than submitting. Here are several resources to get you started...
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/spiderchart.html
http://fantomaster.com/fasvsspy01.html
http://www.spiderhunter.com/
http://www.searchengineworld.com/spiders/spider_ips.htm
STEP 3) Track Your Listings...
OK, you’ve been spidered! That means you’re in, right?
Uhhhh... no. Not really. It just means that that engine knows about you.
Now you have to watch for when each engine lists each of your pages (that have been spidered). The pros call this “being indexed.” They track each engine to see when their pages get indexed (i.e., the pages are officially in the database, but not yet ranked).
For example, at AltaVista, enter your URL (host:yourdomain.com) into the search box. It will show you every page from that domain that it has indexed. Yes, there is a way to check this at each engine. Unfortunately...
Every engine has a different protocol. For more info on how to track which pages have been indexed at each engine...
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/checkurl.html
Site Build It!’s WorldSubmitter will resubmit automatically if any Search Engine doesn’t index within a reasonable amount of time after a spider visit... or if an engine ever drops you from the index.
SBI!'s ListChecker watches for when each engine lists each of your pages (that have been spidered or indexed). When it finds your URL in the index of an engine, it reports this date in the Submit-Spider-List Report.
http://buildit.sitesell.com/
STEP 4) Track Your Rankings...
Great! You’re indexed. That means people are finding you, right? Geez, I hate to be a party-pooper, but... no.
Once you’re indexed, there’s a lag before your pages actually show up in search results. And even then, some of your pages will score better than others.
So now what do the professionals do? They track their ranking for all their keywords, at each engine.
There are several ways to track how your pages rank. Here’s a nice resource, organized to help you do it manually...
http://www.mike-levin.com/
Even so, tracking your rankings manually takes time... too much time. To make things worse, as you’ll see in DAY 8, you have to do it over and over again (each time you make a change to a Web page --> re-submit, spider, index, rank, for each page, for each engine).
Luckily there are services or software that will do it for you. Here’s the best of a not-quite-perfect bunch (I’ve left out several abysmal services)...
1) Position Agent (part of Submit It!) -- At $49 per month, it’s pricey...
http://www.positionagent.com/
Take the free trial at the bottom of the page. You’ll see that not all the engines are covered. And, if you check, the results are not correct for all the engines (at least not at the time I tested it).
2) Top-10 – don’t be put off by the long form that you must fill out to get the free report. It’s a good report, mostly accurate (only missed one engine by a few spots), and is almost complete (only missing Google)...
http://www.top-10.com/
3) AgentWebRanking Suite -- as opposed to the above two, this is client-side software (i.e., it runs on your computer instead of on the Internet). It’s free. And many people speak well of it. Download and try it for yourself...
http://www.aadsoft.com/agentwebranking/ranks.htm
4) WebPositionGold -- probably the Cadillac for ranking. Also client-side software. But it’s expensive, and very complicated to use. This kind of tool is best in the hands of consultants who want to build traffic for businesses.
http://www.webpositiongold.com/
Site Build It! has some awesome reporting tools. After a page has been submitted, spidered and indexed, SBI! will start to report on how that page ranks for its keyword.
The Keyword Ranking Report will tell you how each page ranks during a search for its Specific Keyword. If the ranking is beyond the top 30 for many of the engines, you can click on the “Analyze It!” button. This function will give you suggestions on how to optimize your page.
The Keyword Searches Report will tell you which keywords people are using to find you, will show you how many times you were found with each of these keywords, and will provide a direct search-link so that you can see how you rank at a particular engine for a particular keyword.
http://buildit.sitesell.com/
Yes, it’s a quagmire. Tracking how all your pages rank is definitely tedious stuff.
So why do all the pros do it? Because it’s so important to know where you stand. Every situation is different. You have to get the lay of the land (your land) and see where you stand in it. For example...
You might be writing about succulent plants -- there is an entire world of related Web sites, directory listings, links flying around all over the place... and this set of circumstances is different than the one for “fashion.”
Suppose you wrote two near-identical pages. The only difference is that you replaced the word “fashion” with “cactus” (you should never create such “search- and-replace” pages, of course -- this is an example to make a point). Your fashion page ranks Page 1, #1 for every Search Engine. Does that mean that your cactus page will also be Page 1, #1?
Nope. Because the “Web world” for fashion is totally different from that of the cactus. The point of tracking how you rank is to get the lay of your land.
Once you see how your pages fit in your particular “Web world” (and it likely won’t be great at first), you start tweaking. We’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but...
As we’ll see in the next DAY of this course, the key to building traffic through the free, major Search Engines, is to try different things until you “get the feel” for what ranks highly for your particular theme.
That’s why I recommended in DAY 6 to experiment with different lengths of text, different numbers of Specific Keywords, as well as General Keywords and common synonyms in titles, headlines, etc., etc. If you have many differently constructed pages, you’ll notice which pages rank high and which don’t. And that gives you the basis to improve the ones that don’t.
Yes, it takes some time and effort. That’s why the major Search Engines are not really “free.” They do cost you something... time, after all, is money.
The payoff, however, is terrific... substantial, nearly free (once you work out what succeeds for you), sustained, and targeted traffic.
When you're dealing with 50 or 100 pages, tracking all this really takes time. And imagine when you have four sites up and running! Site Build It!, however, does all of this automatically. Yes... submitting, spider-spotting, index-checking, and rank-tracking. All of it.
Whenever you build or modify a page, Site Build It!’s World Submitter automatically submits it to all the major engines, according to the way, and the frequency, that they want it, and exactly the way a human would submit it by hand.
The Submit-Spider-List Report tells you when each page was submitted, spidered (i.e., when each engines “scooping robot” came to your site and brought each page “back to its database home), indexed (officially available in each engine’s database), and where your page ranks, at each major engine, for the Specific Keyword that the page focuses upon!
What does this mean for you?...
• You don’t lose sleep about submitting, or whether you should re-submit. Site Build It! submits by “e-hand” for you.
• You don’t have to worry about whether the Search Engines “got the message.” Site Build It! can tell when the engines send their little “robots” to spider through your newly built pages, and will soon report to you on this. (NOTE: If the spider does not come, Site Build It! re-submits until those lazy little critters do come... all according to each engine’s acceptable limits.)
• You don’t have to check constantly at the engines to see when your pages become available in their listings. Site Build It! does that for you... and will tell you in this report.
• You don’t have to manually track how your page ranks for your keywords. Site Build It! reports on this, too.
If time is money, Site Build It! is time... time saved!
http://buildit.sitesell.com/
So here’s what you’ve done so far. In DAY 6, you built a Theme-Based Content Site, full of Keyword-Focused Content Pages. As we’ve discussed, you’ve OVERdelivered on content for your human visitors. And, for the engines, you have also varied your “formulas” to see what works.
Now, before you proceed to DAY 8, please complete your DAY 7 Goal-of-the- DAY, and take note of your Ongoing Goal...
Goal-of-the-DAY... Submit your site to the major (free) Search Engines (listed above). Get familiar with tracking... 1) spiders, 2) listing, and 3) ranking.
Ongoing Goal... Track the spiders and re-submit as necessary. Track to see when you get listed, and then track how your pages rank. Do this on a weekly basis.
Earlier today, we talked about how important it is to have a feedback loop from building to tracking. Now that you have feedback from tracking, it’s time to take traffic-building action, which brings us to...
BIG TECHNIQUE #1 The Free Major Search Engines
This is still the best way to build traffic on the Net... if you know what you’re doing.
And you soon will!...
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