how can i get traffic to my site?

[leadlemon]

How can i get traffic to my site? I get unsteady traffic flow, some days I get hundreds some days I get 20 or less. I want to improve my ranking in the search engines so that I get more decent targeted traffic. Is there any SEO tops and advices you could give me on how to improve my rankings?
Thanks.

 

[illram]

This stuff changes alot as Google is constantly evolving their search mechanisms and rankings in part to beat the snake oily SEO tactics designed to push less deserving sites up the rankings, who game the system by basically spamming the internet with "blog posts" and keyword laden content and stuff like that.

The old way (i.e., 1.5 years ago) according to SEO marketers was lots of informative content on your page, with decent keywords, with pictures, and if you could videos. Link out to other sites and hopefully get sites to link to you. Post blog posts on other sites, have an active social media presence on G+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and wherever else that you could have a "business page." They also recommended publishing a monthly "newsletter" (via email) that people could subscribe to by giving you their email.

I dunno. I honestly found the biggest jump for me happened when I just started paying adwords! Seriously if you just need eyes and people to call you that works if you do it right.

 

[warpus]

You should also run your site through an HTML validator, maybe this one, and make it as compliant as possible.

 

[wolfigor]

Is it a commercial web-site?
If so, do you make money from ads (so traffic is key) or paywall, or whatever else?

Let me take explain something...

Assumption #1 you want traffic because you make money out of it
Assumption #2 you make money from advertisement, which is paid by impressions.

Spoiler :

An impression (in the context of online advertising) is when an ad is fetched from its source, and is countable. Clicking or not is not taken into account. Each time an ad is fetched it is counted as one impression.

There are 3 big categories of traffic providers:
1. Search
2. Content Discovery
3. Traffic Brokers


Traffic Brokers
They are cheap (about 0.01$ per viewer), but the quality of viewers is questionable.
They rely on people mostly clicking stuff by mistake, popouts, and bots.
If the ads on your site pay by impressions, and they pay more than what you pay for the traffic then you can make some money.
The traffic you get is very low quality, with up to 90% of bots.
Almost none of those users will convert to loyal users.
If you reply on users paying for your content (buying, subscribe, etc.) then this is the worst traffic for you.
Even in the case of ads, this model is not sustainable in long term (you will never get the high quality & high paying ads.


Content Discovery
There are services like Outbrain and Taboola which brings traffic to your site, for a fee.
Prices are about 0.1$ per "click".
It's mostly human traffic, however the quality is also questionable.
Most of the users you receive arrive following "click baits" articles: ok for advertisement in your page, not too good if you rely on selling something.
You are good if about 10% of this traffic translates into more loyal users (people who will come back to your site directly).


Search
This is Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc.
Here the quality of traffic is very high.
Pretty much 100% human and somehow filtered.
You buy keywords and you will get people who searched those terms: so people that are interested in what you sell in your site.
The prices vary enormously depending on the keywords, but you get quality.
expect prices of 1$ per click... some cost MUCH more (see within spoiler)

Spoiler :

Facebook
Facebook also generate traffic for you, for a fee.
It's somehow contextual, you can really define well the type of users you want.
e.g. "girls, 18-25, in New York, who likes dildos".
People will see your ads in facebook or promoted stories, and some will click and follow to your website.
Given that you can have fine-grain segmentations this is ideal if you have an actual service or content that you sell.
If you live by ads, this will be a too expensive channel.


If you have money to invest and a revenue model you can use a mix of the above to generate traffic.
Start with the cheap one to generate enough traffic to get into the radar of ads agencies.
After you are there you can work on improving the quality of the traffic you get.

Obviously you have to work on SEO (search engine optimization): techniques that help your ranking in Google Search.
Some general techniques are explained in various articles in the net, but to do a good job you need the help of an expert.
However beware... some techniques are "good" others are frowned upon by google and periodically stomp down on who use them.
And beware of charlatans, there are plenty of them.

 

[Zelig]

Good post. Bloomberg also just had a good piece on that: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/

However, I'm not convinced that clicks from search engines (ergo, Google's entire business model) aren't simply people misclicking and/or not realizing they're clicking on ads.

 

[wolfigor]

Good post. Bloomberg also just had a good piece on that: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/

However, I'm not convinced that clicks from search engines (ergo, Google's entire business model) aren't simply people misclicking and/or not realizing they're clicking on ads.

Yes, clearly there are a lot of misclicks even for search engines.
However they are misclicks from people who searched your words: not pure blood, but still much better quality than the other sources of clicks I listed.

I kept myself to the most legitimate sources... There is plenty of crap out there.
Not only black SEO but also its equivalent for Facebook likes & audience.
In my view scams over scams for a larger scam (online advertising).
The bloomberg article you posted is straight to the point, and still only scratches the surface.

The important for someone who wants to buy traffic is to be aware of what he is paying for, and about the consequences of it.

There are other sources of traffic.

For example, especially for mobiles, you have speed-dials.
Today when you start a browser you see a collection of visual bookmarks, genelly arranged in a grid.
Chrome populate them dynamically, while other browsers start pre-populated.
You can buy your spot there.
In some regions you can reach extremely large audiences on mobile.
The clicks here are humans of various degrees of quality (from moderately high to average).
The quality is very regional, it depends on how people use mobiles (believe me there are huge differences of mobile browsing behaviour between countries).
Depending on your website this source of traffic can be perfect or near useless.



I wanted to add a clarification to Facebook
In my previous post I referred mostly to straight advertisement there.
However there is another way to advertise your services in Facebook: create a business page.
You create the official page of your site/service, convince people to like it, or like its posts, or share them.
After that your page will have an audience in Facebook and you posts will be shown to whoever liked/shared your stuff.

How to you get people to like/share your stuff?
Nothing special: standard viral marketing or competitions (e.g. "like this page and you can win a trip to Sudan").
Costs time and money and the quality of the audience is questionable... You could have interesting content, you will get more quality audience, but that also costs a lot.

Recently some friends of mine shared some post on their pages in facebook.
It was from some kind of competitions, like "delta airline for its 50 years offer the possibility to win a trip for whoever share this post".
It was clearly face and and scam... but what is exactly the scam?

People see a page that claim to be official Delta airlines, and share those posts dreaming of winning.
The fake page gains a lot of likes and shares with a large audience.
Somebody arrives and buy such fake page from the scammer: rebuild the page into the official page of his own service and immediately he has a large audience of morons who shared the fake content initially.
Those will soon see posts from the new company page in their Facebook.

This is just an example of the many scams at the bottom of the barrel of this business.


[I work in mobile technology not in advertisement, but this stuff is the sad reality of today internet]

 

[Archbob]

I think social media like twitter, instagram, tumblr, etc are some of the most important things. I'm in the process of gaining instagram and twitter followers.

 

[wolfigor]

I think social media like twitter, instagram, tumblr, etc are some of the most important things. I'm in the process of gaining instagram and twitter followers.

Not knowing what type of website and what type of business model you have, I had to make some assumptions.

Depending on your web-site/business it defines which type of audience you need

 

[Timsup2nothin]

These guys covered a lot of the computer centered answers, but here's one from outside the box.

Content.

No matter how you get people to your site, you have one chance, and only one chance, to give them a reason to come back. If no one comes to your site more than once, all the effort you put into getting them there has to be redone every time. If they come back over and over and over your traffic goes up steadily and everything works out in the long run.

 

[Zelig]

Oh yeah, I meant to post that but got distracted by computery stuff - content is by far and away the best real way though.

 

[wolfigor]

Oh yeah, I meant to post that but got distracted by computery stuff - content is by far and away the best real way though.

Indeed quality is king:
Always new, high quality, content is the key of returning users.

For me that's a given: if you have no quality content there is no way to keep a self-sustaining business.

The various ways to acquire users are a jump-start for any online business: it's a way to make your site/application/service visible.
Once you reach a critical mass of returning users, you can tune down the other promotions.
Ideally at a certain point you get a self-sustaining organic growth.

For example in a "place" like GooglePlay (same applies for Apple Appstore) is very difficoult for new applications to get visibility.
You may have the best application/content and still there are other thousands competitors crowding the market.
Ideally marketing in such context has the task of bring your application up in the ranking to be in the top 5: after that your visibility in the store makes your application visible and generate enough downloads and installs to keep the same position.

The cost of doing by "brute force" in short time is considerable.
One has to build up hype or have a lot of time available (growing fast is more expensive & difficoult).