SEO TIPS: Traffic Options

Are you learning from the past or are you repeating mistakes? Good webmasters are not only learning from the past, they are using it to help gain insight into the future. The problem, however, is that far too many webmasters are learning from the past and never using that knowledge to look forward and even more are not learning at all. Each update, you’ve seen these webmasters bemoaning their fate and complaining about how much work it will take just to get back to where they were. Similarly, you will see those who looked to the future being too busy looking forward to the next update to chime in.

Newsletters are not a thing of the past! They are alive and well and can help keep people that have shown interest in your product/service up to date with what is going on very effectively and efficiently. If you can successfully start converting followers into newsletter subscribers you have gone a long way toward protecting the traffic you already have. You will not get every visitor to subscribe to a newsletter, but just under 20% will generally share your newsletter with someone else at least one time over the course of a year – assuming you put out one newsletter per month. The numbers that grow from this can be staggering – but the key is to provide a high quality newsletter that isn’t set to go to the spam folder and to not overdo it.

If you don’t want your main domain cluttered with a blog and all the posts it can generate – take it elsewhere and use it drive traffic back to your site. Your blog is where you create a community that people connect with others at and participate in discussions. Giving people a place to connect and talk about your product / service is a must these days. Social networks can serve this purpose as well, but blogs are still extremely valuable because unlike your social networks that will be indexed once, your blog can have many pages indexed. Once people feel like a part of community, the odds are they will remain a member of that community no matter what algorithm changes come down the pipe.

Circling back to of social platforms – use them! Whether you choose to go with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or all of the above and then some, social platforms provide extra avenues for you to engage new clients and get fresh traffic back to your domain. These are no longer an option. You don’t have to be a force on all of them, but you have to have a presence and have at least one as your main point of engagement. Best of all, these are free and they do not require long posts that are optimized. All they require is you network a little, provide some engaging links and comments a few times per day and reap the benefits.

Don’t depend on Google or strictly search engine traffic in any manner for the bulk of your traffic and have geared everything to appeasing the Google gods. Spend some time reviewing your strategy and weigh how expanding your interaction with potential customers through alternate avenues can help you build a foundation to withstand algorithm changes. It will take a little time and the results will not be instant, but anything worth doing is rarely if ever easy or instant. If the past tells us anything, it tells us changes are coming and we stay ahead of them or spin our wheels catching up to them. Choose to stay ahead.

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