Website Traffic that Converts - Are You Missing Out?

By, JR

The Best Website Traffic

What makes the best website traffic? Well, as far as I am concerned and I’m sure you’ll agree, it is website traffic that performs the action on my website that I intend it too. Whether it is to buy something from my affiliate marketing niche sites, click on Adsense, to subscribe to a blog or whatever action the webmaster intends that will lead to us making money. So, the best website traffic is traffic that converts.

Not all Website Traffic is Equal

If I have 5,000 unique visitors a day, and they do not perform any of the intended actions that I want them to then this is totally worthless website traffic, would you not agree?

Since the social, Web 2.0 revolution on the net there has been a craze with webmasters clammering to get a chunk of social traffic. Page 1 of Digg is often considered the holy grail of website traffic, but in reality Digg and other such popular social site traffic can be pretty worthless. You may get lucky occasionally but it’s nothing to rely on long term.

The reality is that social traffic hardly ever buys anything, subscribes or performs any other actions that will lead to you making money, which is why we are all here right?

Social traffic can be great as far as “numbers of website traffic” and getting more website traffic, becoming famous, but when it comes to converting website traffic it is often a big fat vacuum. Unless your goal is to become the next Tech Crunch, social traffic is not the best for making money online.

Look at your analytics and analyze what website traffic is making you money, I guarantee it won’t be social traffic. Of all my niche sites and Squidoo lenses, social website traffic has made me too little to mention! In fact, I recently launched a ringtones blog, and I got 1500 uniques from Stumble in one day, how many sales? ZERO!!!! A perfect example of how worthless that traffic is.

There are probably many reasons for this, first and foremost of which is the fact that social traffic is not well targeted, many of them are just browsing or bored, they are not performing an intentional search to solve a problem, a basic principle of any kind of marketing is that in order to get sales there must be a consumer with a problem and someone who provides a solution and THAT will lead to the desired action. Same with Internet marketing.

Also, the same concept applies to the website traffic from article marketing and blog comments where you may get traffic and even some who take the action you desire but it’s never a consistent nor  a reliable stream of well converting website traffic. While blog comments certainly are good for networking and getting known for your flagship blogs,  you constantly have to comment on blogs to get even a little bit of traffic so it is not “passive” traffic.

The main purpose of article marketing, social bookmarking and blog comments is NOT website traffic but link building for BACKLINKS and those backlinks lead to higher to Page One of SERPS for your sites keywords and THAT leads to converting website traffic.

I am not including Internet forum participation here, because there you will find targeted traffic that is looking for solutions and so that traffic often converts very well.

Best Source of Website Traffic that Converts

The best source of long term, stable converting website traffic are the search engines and specifically Google, since they dominate that arena.

1. Website traffic from the search engines is the best converting traffic because it is truly targeted. When someone sits down to search for something on the net, they are purposely looking to solve a specific problem, and they are much more likely to perform an action on your website than any one else.

2. Search engine traffic is all day everyday, 24/7, unlimited possibilities. While social traffic is temporary and gets buried over with newly submitted content, sitting on Page One of SERPS is far more stable. It may take time to get to Page One, but once you are there your site will get exposure to that targeted website traffic with little maintenance.

I am not saying that you should not test every possible traffic source for your niche, and especially when your site is new and you are working on ranking high in the SERPS, you should get all the traffic you can get. What I am saying is that search engine website traffic should always be the main end goal of any online campaign and it is the best converting website traffic.

Website Traffic with SERP Domination

Many webmasters and bloggers work hard to get their home page on Page One of SERPS by utilizing basic Search Engine Optimization. They do all the requisite tasks such as, on-site SEO, link building, keyword research and optimization etc… But, they completely ignore the inner pages of their websites and/or blog posts. This is a complete waste of perfectly good search engine website traffic. This is especially true for bloggers.

Time and again I see blog posts that are obviously just randomly picked titles without any keyword research when there is ALWAYS a good keyword that can be found for ANY subject. So the end result is that your home page may sit high in SERPS, but all your other pages are just randomly floating somewhere around the web missing out on a ton of good targeted website traffic and all for the price of ten minutes or less of research.

Also remember that as your home PR (page rank) increases it will bleed that PR to your inner pages. This blog is a PR3, but several of the earlier blog posts are PR1 and PR2 and those post titles were carefully keyword researched and now they sit on several Page One’s in Google for their keywords and continuously bring targeted website traffic to this blog. Google will spread the authority you’ve earned from your home page to inner pages placing you higher all over the SERPS, for all your keywords and this SERP domination is what brings more and more targeted, converting website traffic. And the absolute same applies to static website’s inner pages.

Keyword Research for Inner Pages

• Use SEO Book Free Keyword Suggestion Tool and/or Google Keyword Tool to look for good keywords for your inner pages, I look for at least 30 searches a day, but the more the better.
• Search allintitle:”your keywords” in Google to evaluate the competition. I usually choose lower competition keywords for inner pages, under 20,000.

As always you want to have the most possible searches with the least amount of competition.

3 Keyword Optimization Essentials for SERP Domination:

Here are the most important aspects of optimizing each and everyone of your website pages and blog posts for the SERPS.

1. On Page Title vs. Meta Title

On Page Title is the one the visitor sees on your page, such as the title of the blog post. The Meta Title is the title in the Meta Tags that the search engines will look to for your SERP placement. So, you can make the title the visitor sees longer and more detailed if you wish, while the Meta title can be shortened to comply with Meta Tag character standards and to zone in on keywords, but make sure it is still attractive to get the click from searchers.

• Both titles should have your keywords in them
• The Meta Title should have the keywords listed first or as close to the beginning of the tag as possible.
• The On Page Title should be the header on your website inner page with the <h1> tags. In Wordpress this is automatic.

If you don’t have it, you really need to get the All-In-One SEO Pack plug-in for Wordpress. This will give you the Meta Tags module for customizing meta tags for every post and it is really a must have for Wordpress. It also provides some other important features for SEO on WP blogs.

2. Keyword Density

Long posts and website pages are the best for the SERPS and getting more website traffic, they allow the most room for keyword density and they also give the edge of lots of content for Google.

• 5% Keyword density per post/page, especially first couple of sentences, middle and ending paragraph.
• Bold the keywords a few times and especially in the last couple of sentences.
• Use <h2> and <h3> tags for the paragraph headers within content using your keyword, as I did in this post.  Example: <h2>Keyword - Paragraph Header</h2>

3. Permalinks

The permalink must have your keywords in it. So, if my keywords are “how-to bake”, then my permalink for the blog post page or website page would be: htttp://www.recipes.com/how-to-bake-cake. That’s it, nothing else, if you add the whole title you just confuse Google as to what you want to rank for.

Some website software, and Wordpress will automatically add the entire title of your post/page into the permalink so, you must edit this. All extra words except for the keywords are UNNECESSARY and can be a detterent to ranking well in the SERPS.

Permalinks and Wordpress

With Wordpress you have to make sure to select the proper permalink structure. By default Wordpress will create permalinks for posts using the post number, like this: http://getinternetmarketingstrategies.com/?p=123.  This does nothing for you in the SERPS.

How to Change Permalink Structure in WP:

From your Admin Dashboard go to Settings and then Permalinks. From there either choose Month and Name OR if you do not want to date your posts you can choose Custom Structure and then enter /%postname%/ into the box. This way you will have the optimal setting of http://www.yourdomain.com/posttitle

Editing Permalinks on a Post by Post Basis:

When you are writing posts from the editor after you enter the title the permalink will be formed automatically, click edit and get rid of everything but the keywords with the dashes in between each word.

Performing these steps is really important for SERP rankings and getting website traffic from a multitude of keyword sources to get those visitors to your sites. Also, please see 6-Step Checklist for On-Site SEO for more techniques for keyword optimization for inner pages, such as Alt Tags for images.

What do you guys think? Do you research each page and post? If not, why?

If you love the content buy me a coffee.

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