SIMPLE Traffic Solutions
One thing I quickly realized when I got started online was the fact I needed to generate
quite a lot of traffic to my websites if I was to make any money online. In the early days I
fell for the paid traffic scams that promised a huge amount of traffic for a small
investment! None of those methods delivered any results, the ‘hit’s were probably
automated or from visotors that were so un-targeted that they would never bring any
real results.
So I tried my hand at PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic, mostly Google AdWords, with that
comes a whole new level of stress, first of all you have to set up your campaign, have it
approved, bid for keywords, track results, etc. This was something I was never able to
turn into a profit as I was always having to pay over 50 cents per click for decent
keywords. So after losing a few thousand dollars and wasting hundreds of hours
researching and testing I decided I wasn’t going to pay for my traffic.
Then I tried my hand at SEO. (Search Engine Optimization) Unfortunately, with the vast
amount of competition out there, there’s just no easy way to approach SEO. Plus I have
heard horror stories of people spending years perfecting an SEO method that starts to
bring results only to see the mighty Google change its algorithm and the traffic stops
overnight.
You see, the problem with paid traffic and organic search engine traffic is it can
disappear overnight. If you remember the famous Google slap a few years ago that
basically put thousands of marketers out of business overnight by making PPC
keywords so expensive they couldn’t be bid on you will know what I mean.
Then we’ve had the famous penguin and panda updates that have seen poor quality
websites disappear off the search results altogether. While this is not a bad thing if you
provide quality content it did kill off thousands of businesses.
How Websites Are Found by Search Engines A refresher course on how websites are discovered may prove helpful as you start your free traffic campaign. No website is instantly “Googleable”. Rather, a site’s content is written and then you as the webmaster will "inform" the major search engines that there is new content to “crawl” and then “index.” Based on each search engine’s unique algorithm, your site will then be ranked and your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) returned based upon keyword requests from users. The question is: "How do you get the attention of search engines?" When the Internet was young, the best way to do it was to simply submit your URL to a search engine’s “Suggest” page. However, times have changed and there are simply too many sites and too many pages to take into consideration. Now, companies prefer that you notify search crawlers by way of “pinging” search engines when new content is available. There is an automatic way to do this (which we will discuss a little later), as well as a manual submission method involving visiting the site you want to be indexed by, and submitting your sitemap document. Keep in mind that just because a search engine has been “pinged” does not mean you’re going to get the royal treatment. While some popular sites and search-friendly sites have the privilege of practically “live” search results, less popular, new and rarely updated sites will only be crawled and indexed on a periodic basis. For that matter, if your optimization methods are poor, you may actually be listed…but appear far down in the rankings that you might as well not be listed at all. This usually happens when you disregard advice about proper "optimization" techniques. For example: • E