Blake Newman

Business Analyst, SEO, Web Designer
Herndon, Virginia

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Five quick and easy steps to drive traffic to your website

Grab your website by its browsers and take control of your own online marketing effort. In 30 minutes a day, over a period of 2-3 weeks, you can see significant results by following these easy steps.

Written Sep 05, 2008, read 1217 times since then.

Top 5 steps you can take to dramatically improve the performance of your website traffic:

Choose the right key words. By far, the most important thing you need to do is choose the right key words. The trap that most of us fall into is focusing on the keywords that we use to describe ourselves rather than the semantics that our clients use. My favorite example is the very proud professional who calls herself a, "certified automotive technician," when her clients actually call her a, "Volvo Mechanic." See the difference? If I had just moved to Reston, Virginia from California and needed to find the closest service center for my car, I would likely Google, "Reston Volvo mechanic," not, "certified automotive technician."
Name each page appropriately. Say that I have at least 5 pages in my website. I want to ensure that my TITLE tags are appropriate for each page and include my keywords. Of course, this assumes that you have been able to get basic access to the your website code. Don't worry, it's not that difficult. At the top of the code, there is a section called, "head." In this section is another section called, "title." Each page should have a unique title. Page one title should be something like, "About Reston Volvo, your Reston Virginia Volvo Mechanic." Page two would be something like, "Reston Volvo service center for oil changes and tune ups by a Volvo mechanic." Following me?
Set up a blog ... and use it. By far, one of the best ways to keep Google, and your clients coming back to your website frequently is to provide regular, useful, relevant information that will benefit your website visitors. But guess what, just today I stumbled upon another business networking website that had a blog with a single entry from July 2007 with the subject, "Coming soon." A blog does you no good if it's idle.
Digg yourself. Google has started paying more and more attention to the social bookmarking sites like Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. These sites create a network of inbound links which contribute towards your Google PageRank (PR). The more inbound links you have, the higher your PR and that creates a multiplying effect for your search engine optimization. While you are at it, ask all of your friends and relatives and colleagues and professional acquaintences to Digg your site as well. I call this Social Bookmarketing, a name that I coined that focuses on a deliberate and proactive effort of exploiting the power of social bookmarking sites for your own online marketing. Imagine if you Digged 5 articles on your website and then 5 of your friends and family and 5 of your colleagues and business associates all Digged 5 pages or articles on your blog as well. This comes up to about 75 inbound links. Write 5 articles a month and have that network Digg the articles and you are generating close to 1,000 inbound links a year. That adds some serious link juice to your web site.
Network Online. There are dozens of online social and professional networking venues just like this. Certainly, you can't beat www.BizNik.com for professional networking that doesn't suck. But, there are others out there as well like LinkedIn, Migente, FaceBook, and YouTube. What you want to do is own the entire first page of Google for your company name and your own personal name. In addition, you want to ensure that you create links from your profile on these social and professional networking sites back to your website. You want to create an entire net to catch all website visitors who are looking specifically for you, your company, or your product or service. Featuring all of these keywords in these social networking profiles helps to reinforce that focused campaign.

Okay, that's all for now. Follow these steps and you will be on your way to search engine obsession (seo) a.k.a., search engine optimization. In just 15-30 minutes a day, if you could work just a little on one of these 5 steps, you will soon build your way up to the top of Google's page rankings.

Learn more about the author, Blake Newman.

Posted by John Huddleston, Bellevue, Washington | Sep 05, 2008

Good stuff Blake. As we network online, are there suggestions on what makes the best Google juice, or what to watch out for? I was posting for months at TaxAlmanac (a high PR tax site run by intuit), before I learned about "nofollow". None of my post offered any Google juice. On other sites, the comments are on low rank pages while the web owner's orignal comments are on a higher PR page. Sometimes it seams frames may be used to limit the value of a link. For example, every article I ever wrote for Ezinearticles.com appears to have a page rank of 6, just like the home page. I don't believe a tax article I wrote 3 years ago on some obscure tax provision ranks that high. Is my article sitting in a frame and the pagerank bar on my browser actually refers to the border only? Blake, any insight you or any SEO expert can offer is appreciated. It sounds like issues for another article?

Thanks much.
John Huddleston
Huddleston Tax Consulting

CPA tax preparation in Seattle Bellevue Redmond
Posted by Sumesh Bhagat, Kirkland, Washington | Sep 05, 2008

John , I think you are absolutely right. The url of frame/iframe doesn't show on the browser's url, search engines can not index it. Since it is part of the main page so it inherits the rank of its container.

Sumesh
Posted by Blake Newman, Washington, D.C. | Sep 05, 2008

John, for a tax consultant you are pretty SEO savvy. In the case you are referring to, the website owner is using you and your content to bring him business but he's not sharing the juice.

Personally, I think you should save your energy for your own site and your own blog ... unless you can find a venue that lets the Google juice flow (like BizNik).

Also, there are plenty of blogs out there that allow you to comment on the posts. Usually, they ask for your name, your email address, your URL, and your comment. When you enter your name, be sure to use your keywords, not your real name.

For example, in your case, my first name would be Seattle and my last name would be Tax Consulting. That way, your keywords are part of the anchor text used in the link and you get more bang for the time.

The nice thing about commenting on blogs is that you can get the same amount of link credit without all the effort of composing a well thought-out blog post.

My only caution is that if this becomes abused, Google will find a way to discredit the technique. So, be sure to compose a useful, thoughtful, and relevant comment.
Posted by Pamela Ziemann, Bellevue, Washington | Sep 06, 2008

Can you comment on the optimal number of posts per week to a blog? I've heard several times a day or at least daily but more recently I heard the number of posts wasn't as critical as it once was.

Thanks for your references.
Posted by Blake Newman, Washington, D.C. | Sep 07, 2008

Hi Pamela,

I don't think there is a magic number of posts per day, week, or month. What is probably most important is that you provide quality, relevant, useful information for your website visitors.

The more unique and helpful your information, the more likely people are to bookmark your blog or website and the more likely people are to link to your blog posts. That is the ultimate goal ... genuine interest, bookmarking, and links to your website because you have provided value to the community.

If you look at some of the high-powered, world-class blogs like www.TechCrunch.com, www.Politico.com, and www.HuffingtonPost.com, you will see that they actually have a staff of bloggers or journalists making multiple posts per week.

As a result, Google sends bots and spiders out to these sites continuously. Consequently, within minutes of a post, it is indexed in Google.

Personally, I try to do a post a day. And,if I miss a day, I try to squeeze in two posts to make up for the lost day. Certainly, if you are not posting at least once a month, you might as well give up the blog.

Hope that helps.
Posted by Pamela Ziemann, Bellevue, Washington | Sep 07, 2008

Yes, Thanks Blake. I'll look up those sites. I've heard blogs are more about letting people know your personality.

Personally, I feel better when I know my blog gives something people can use. I guess with service providers it's important to give that information with our unique style.

~Thanks again.