Method One: The Long Tail Method (takes work)
What’s on your website right now? If it’s hierarchical you probably have a home page, an about us page, maybe a rates page, maybe a products page or category, maybe a pictures page, these are all probably grouped together somewhere – those links are called your navigation. If it’s chronological (like a blog) you probably have dates or categories pointing to your past posts, these are still called your navigation. It’s best if your navigation, or some form of your navigation links are available from every page on your site.
You want to add a link to your navigation called something like *Your topic* Information or About *Your Topic*. This link should be to a page that lists all your keyword articles. If you were going to write a lot of articles you could break them down further and list the entire breakdown in your navigation.
You are going to write (or have someone write for you) articles that impart unique and interesting information about each set of phrases on your keyword list, targeting at least two phrases or words on each page.
It is imperative that each article has a unique, targeted title tag, is not spammy, and is unique, interesting, personal to your business, and at least 200 words in length.
…. because this is what the user sees when they search in a search engine. You want the title tag to tell them exactly what they will find when they click over to that page, and you want it to be accurate and enticing. Ensure it is accurate, because lots of people clicking on your page and then hitting the back button and going to another page on the list tells Google your site is not a good result for that particular search. You really want mostly people coming to your site that find exactly what they are looking for and spend a bit of time there. This will tell Google that your site is real, and worthy of high rankings.
Google can tell how much time people spend at your site two ways:
- If you use Google Analytics (which is free and lots of people do)
- If a user on your site has the Google toolbar installed (completely out of your control, and hundreds of thousands of people do).
…. because eventually the search engines will figure it out and ban your site from their indexes, or at least push you off the front page where you won’t get any traffic anyway. Spammy, to me, means any attempt to trick the search engines into giving you undeserved high rankings for any search term. In my opinion, the absolute only valid, long-term, sustainable way to deserve high rankings is top-notch, high-quality content, products, and services. So, don’t use hidden text, don’t buy links at an attempt to gain PR, don’t do crazy linking schemes, don’t count keyword density, don’t chase the algorithms, and don’t put any words on your page that don’t belong there.
… because Google has a duplicate content filter. If you just take your keyword list and write one article, then stick a different title tag on it for each keyword phrase and maybe change a paragraph here or there, well Google will only show one of those articles in the SERPs if you are lucky and if you are unlucky they may ban your site for attempting to spam the results.
… because otherwise why would anyone want to read it, what purpose does it serve, and how does it speak of your business?
… because this will make your business stand out, pulling both the customers and the search engines to you.
This is really an arbitrary number. You will probably find ‘experts’ advising 150 words, but what can you really say in that few words? Basically, just make sure you are actually saying something of value – if not, combine the article with another. As for how long should the articles be? Experts will say no more than 500 words, but I say that’s baloney. Make it as long as you want, just don’t ramble. People want the knowledge you have.
Ok, now that we know our ultimate goal is an article from about each like set of keywords, let’s take our keyword list and see what we can do with it now. *See the pdf file of this ebook for detailed information on how to determine keyword lists and how to break them down and determine which keywords are best to base articles on and how to do it.
Ok, so that’s the long tail method to traffic. Basically, it’s based on the principle that searches that only one or two people search for a day are, in total, much more numerous than the sum of each search that bring in hundreds of people per day. And it’s true. One of my sites sat at number 3 for the term Hawaii Travel for years. You would think a term like Hawaii travel would bring hundreds of people in a day. Well, it brought in about 30 people a day. That’s it. And now that I sit between number 6 and number 9 consistently for that term I get like 3 people a day from it. Obscure searches like big island snorkeling beach may bring me only one person a day, but I get thousands of people at my sites daily from thousands of similarly obscure search terms.
For insightful instruction into this method read this article. It is from early 2002 so there are two things from it that is completely outdated: do not submit your site to the search engines anymore (you want them to find you through a link), and don’t be free about reciprocal linking (I talk more about that kind of linking here). Also, I wouldn’t bother with a dedicated server unless you really get serious about ecommerce. Other than that, it’s as valid as it ever was. This is how normal people maximize the visitors to their website.
For an incredibly comprehensive search engine help ebook see the ebook Winning the Search Engine Wars. I bought this ebook several years back and really got a lot of good knowledge out of it. The best thing is it’s all in one compact format with simple, easy-to-understand language. It comes with a six month subscription to the most up-to-date, tested advice about getting your pages indexed and ranking well in the industry. It’s even run by a Hawaii resident!
Method Two: Pay for Traffic (takes money)
Pay for traffic includes pay-per-click, affiliate, pay-per-lead advertising, and independent advertising. I rely strictly on organic listings (free) and have never paid for traffic, so I can’t help you much here, but I’ll point you to some good reading material. Important: for any and all pay-for-traffic: You must create landing pages with marketing methods geared towards your keywords that brought in the click! Do not send everyone to your home page or any general page. You’ll just lose money that way.
I don’t advertise using any sort of pay-for-traffic methods, but I do frequently click on ads, both on webpages and in search engine results. I normally will not take the time to search for what I want. If the page I click over to does not tell me exactly what I thought it was going to because of the ad I clicked on, I just hit the back button and try the next one.
How to Write a Good Landing Page:
Create Effective Landing Pages
Create Landing Pages that Convert
This is when you pay either a website directly, or a search engine, or a broker of some sort an amount of money for every click you receive via the service. You then try to convert them into a buyer of some sort.
Beginner’s Guide to PPC Search engines (part 1)
Beginner’s Guide to PPC Search Engines (part 2)
Pay per click Guide
For affiliate advertising, you would set yourself up as a merchant, and then your affiliates would advertise your products or services for you. For every sale that comes from an affiliate site, you would pay the affiliate a commission, usually between 7 and 20 percent.
The big facilitator networks like linkshare and cj charge merchants big bucks, but that’s where most of the affiliates are. There’s also shareasale which is easy on merchants and good to affiliates, but still new. Or, you could be an indie (independent merchant) who runs their tracking software in house. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any good, unbiased information about becoming a merchant, you could just start by reading the “become a merchant” spiel at each affiliate network.
This is very affiliate like, but instead of paying when someone buys something, you would pay the affiliate each time someone from their link signs up for your newsletter or fills out a form. I am in a pay per lead program right now that pays me $1.25 every time someone signs up for a newsletter.
For Hawaii activities especially, there are tons of booking engines and specialty sites that will advertise your service for a fee. Just about every site here is a booking engine or site.
If you are Selling Products
If you are selling several products, you probably want to use the long tail method. You’d start by writing good descriptions of each and every product, detailing not only the features of the product but also the benefits. Give each product its own page. Use good, mild SEO on each of these pages. Use Wordtracker results to help determine what keywords should be targeted and placed on each page. Once your product pages are all indexed and hopefully ranking in the search engines you can add an informational section to your site to garner links and extra searchers. Make sure you have prominent links to a related product at the top and bottom of each information article to funnel searchers to your product pages.
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