Hold off on Comments
Most people who create their websites make sure that they incorporate a comments
section. This is done so that people who visit can start to leave comments. This is
very useful because many times people who comment on your section will also link
back to their articles on similar topics. Of course, people do this to increase their
own ranking, but it is also helpful to you if you have more unique people linking to
your site. It improves your standing with the search engines tremendously.
There is one problem with this though and that this section is like a two edged sword.
If you are a regular web surfer you would have come across umpteen sites where
there is not one single comment written. Of course you can employ others to write in
a few, but it is very easy to make out the real ones from the fake. Rather than do this
it is better to leave the comments section blank.
Yet, leaving it blank seems to imply that your site really does not have many
followers. It can give an empty feeling to the site and even if the content is quite
good, just because there is not a single comment in it many people will not return to
your site.
When do I start it?
The best way to tackle this is to start up this section after some time. During this time
you will be trying various different methods to improve the rankings and improve
traffic to your site. Once you find that you are getting around 500 to 700 hits who
stay for some time every day would be the right time for you to start this section. If
you are offering an RSS feed you can start as soon as you hit the one hundred
subscribers mark.
What you are ensuring by doing this is that your site has a minimum quorum that
will at least follow up on comments once someone starts off. Plus, you are also
improving your chances of having at least one in this group who will in the least
leave a “Good job” in the comments section. Of course, you may lose out on
comments on previous articles, but it is a risk that you will have to take.
There is no rule governing how long it will take for this to happen. For all you know you
may start seeing a lot of activity in your blog once you post your first article itself and if
you find that there are a number of people leaving comments about what you
have written, you can open the section on the second day itself. All we advise you to
do is to open the comments section only when you feel that you will have a good
number of followers who will use the section instead of leaving it empty.
Create a Sitemap
A sitemap is just one page where you have the whole layout of your website. Smaller
simpler websites may not necessarily want one, but sites that have a number of pages
definitely have to have one. This page is very important for two reasons.
First, if you have or are planning to have a large number of pages to your website,
it is better to have one page from where people can navigate to different places on
your site. It makes the whole browsing experience simpler making sure that you do
not lose any visitors because they feel that navigating your site is too complicated.
Second, this page is important because you can submit this page to search engines
to index. This has the double advantage of forcing the search engine crawlers to
follow all the links in the page thus indexing all pages and also ensures that your site
gets indexed quicker. Sometimes, especially if your site has a large number of
pages crawlers do not probe more than two links into the site meaning that pages
that lead deeper into your site are left un-indexed.
Many people who have such sitemaps find that this page gets ranked much higher
in most search engines for most keywords than the actual page dealing with the
keyword giving you the double benefit of a higher ranking as well as making sure
that people visit other pages in your site.
How do you organize the sitemap?
This is basically up to you. Some people just have one page where they have links to
all the pages in their website. This page will not be visible to the browsing public, but
will be useful for the search engines to index all the pages in your website. This is
the simplest form of having a sitemap Others use JavaScript drop down menus to help navigate their sites, but then the
crawlers do not read this. This means that you will have to have a text version of the
sitemap done just so that it gets indexed. You can always keep this portion invisible
while keeping the scripted portion visible.
The formatting of the page is up to you. Depending on the number of main pages
you can follow the traditional top across, or left vertical method. If you are good at
designing you can even follow a completely new method. It is however safer to
stick with the traditional if only because it gives some familiarity to your website
from the point of view of first time visitors.
Big Traffic
Traffic to websites is a very fickle thing. There may be days when there is almost
no activity, and there may be days when the amount of activity can almost bring
your site down. Only with experience can you gauge if there is any pattern to this or
not. Different sites dealing with different subjects have different patterns and there
is no way to gauge what sort of traffic pattern you will have until you start yours and
keep it running for some time.
It is however a given that there will be days when you see a bump up in traffic. There
may be a very sound reason for this, for example, if you are releasing new software on
your site. Other times, your site may be pulled out of near obscurity simply because
some factor outside your influence has turned the public eye your way.
For example, if you have a site that deals with global warming, you will see a
certain amount of activity on a daily basis, and then one fine day there may be a
storm somewhere that put a whole township under water, or a huge chunk of an
iceberg may break off the Antarctic. The next day you may see a tremendous jump
up in traffic.
As soon as you see that there is a jump in the traffic, even if only slight, make sure
that you take advantage of it. Start increasing the number of posts, and make sure
that there is some activity in your site within the next 24 hrs. Some web surfers
are not known the most loyal and will immediately forget about your site if there is
nothing happening for more than a day.
In this day and age where things happen really fast, it is the people who keep track
and take advantage of small shifts in traffic patterns who do well. The web is a
media outlet much like your television, and if there is something happening and a
particular channel is not covering it, how long would you stay with that channel.
Exactly how long others will stay with you if you do not take advantage of something
happening in your field.
You may only have a site that has software for sale, but if Apple is releasing a new
version of their iPod it is best to take it up. If you feel that the topic is outside the
scope of your site, start a topic on your blog, that's what blogs are for. This is also
a good way of driving traffic to your site, especially if you have your blog as a sub-
domain.
Become Part of an Online Community
This is something that most people who have websites will have to do as a default.
These online communities are where people meet and share information or just chat,
all without moving from their chair. Whether you know it or not, just creating an ID in
a community like Facebook or Twitter will ensure that you get some activity to your
page. Even if there is nothing there to attract people, there may be people who just
find your name appealing and visit your page.
Making sure that you devote time to having a good profile in these communities, and
update them as to what is new is a good way of telling people about what you are
doing. If you are in real earnest, you can be connected to hundreds, or thousands of
people whom you hardly know, and if you can coax a portion of them to visit your
site, you are once again driving that little more traffic your way.
Get to know the community
Before you start planning on using any community as a marketing tool, first know
what they are. These places are just a virtual place where you can network with
your friends, but the social etiquette remains. This means that just as you cannot go
to your club and then start selling stuff there to your fellow club members; you
cannot do that online either. Many people would be shocked to even consider doing
something like this at their club, but will not think twice about approaching their
network online.
Yet, unlike a club a networking site online gives you a number of facilities, the least
of which is that you can inform your network about anything new in your life. Just as
people would not take it badly if you sent out bulk messages that you have gotten
married or have a child, you can inform people that you are starting a new venture.
If worded properly you will receive replies wishing you the best in your new venture.
Don't market
This is the last thing that you must do. Many people make this mistake and pay for it
by not only not getting any increase in traffic, but by making sure that they have
effectively alienated their network because they have just showed themselves to be
someone who uses their personal network for business. Your Facebook or Twitter
ID is where you post what is happening with you, not a place where you sell
products or services; you do that in your website. For example, if you have a website
that deals with cooking, and offer recipes, make sure that this is part of your ID. At a
later date if you want to bring out a short book of recipes for a price that you hope to
sell online as an eBook, just telling your network about it will give you a lot of
dividends. Don't approach them telling them that you hope that they will support your
new venture by buying what you are selling, that is the worst thing that you can do.
Instead treat them as you would your friends. Just keep them informed about
what's happening with your life, and that this is a big thing with you. If you don't
push your product, you will be prompting people to at least visit your site to take a
look at what you have to offer. As to whether they buy your book or not depends a
lot on other factors the least of them being that the book should have some real
stuff that they cannot find for free elsewhere.
But even if your book does not sell, you have done something else, and that is to
drive traffic to your site and the bottom line is that even if one income stream, you
hoping to make money out of the book, does not click, you will probably make
some out of your advertisers because of the increased traffic.
Be Patient
There is probably no other piece of advice that is as important as this. It takes time to
do anything and there is no way that you are going to become an instant success. If
you take the success stories of any person, you will find that there are two things in
common, hard work and time.
Do not start a website unless you feel passionately that it will work. If you do believe
that it will work you should be willing to sacrifice a lot of time and effort to make it
work. Even if you have the best content and do everything else that is supposed to
guarantee that your site will become a hit, you still need to give sufficient time for it
to work.
Google sandbox
Another reason for being patient is because of something that is commonly referred
to as the Google sandbox. This sandbox is just a theory that a number of web
masters feel is true although Google has not come right out and admitted it. A few
things that they have mentioned however seem to indicate that there is a sandbox
that Google uses.
This sandbox is just a virtual box where Google dumps new websites or sites that
Google believes are setting out deliberately to cheat their search engine, or even
sites that have been taken over by spammers. Since there is no direct conformation
from Google that there is really a sandbox finding out if your website is there is a little
difficult.
There are a few pointers though. First, if you have just launched your website, it is
almost guaranteed that your site is there. It is possible that your site can have a page
rank, and it may even pop up on subsidiary searches, but any direct search will not
show your site on the results page.
This sandboxing is different from Google penalizing you. If you are in penalty then
you will lose your page rank and sometimes the Google search area may even be
greyed out. In the sandbox the website just sits around until Google deems it to be
a worthy website to start to display on its results page.
Why this sandbox
Since designing web pages is actually not as expensive as other forms of marketing,
many organizations started to create websites just for promotional purposes and
then shut it down. This meant that there were a number of results with broken links in
Google, not a good thing for any search engine.
Spammers are another reason for this. Until this sandboxing by Google started,
spammers used to start a site just to send out spam, but these sites tended to get
very high ranking in a short time, once again something that search engines do not
want in their results.
There are a number of other reasons for Google adopting this policy, but suffice it to
say that it is there for a purpose, to weed out the real from the fake. The duration that
websites stay in this sandbox can last anywhere between a couple of months to a
year. Nobody has too much information about this, and your guess is probably as
good as any other person's out there. The only thing that you can do here is to be
patient. Continue with adding in more content and link back, in short continue to
operate as if your website were not in limbo. There are two reasons for this. One is
the very simple reason that Google is not going to notify you before it removes your
site from its sandbox and unless you are prepared you will be caught napping.
The other reason is that you can take this time to refine your website so that once
it comes out of the sandbox you will be ready to take advantage of an exponential
increase in your ranking.
You can't beat it
There are a number of websites that offer supposedly guaranteed ways to remove
your site from the sandbox, but it is good to take all this advice with a pinch of salt.
Google has done this with a purpose and unless you can show specific cause,
there is no reason for them to excuse you. Even if you do everything that you can
think of to show Google that you are really a genuine site, there is no guarantee
that it will work.
It is much better to include this time into your ramping up schedule but have a
strategy in place to take advantage of the time that your website comes out of
the sandbox.
Of course you can purchase an established site instead of creating one of your
own, which means that you can hit the ground running, but even here, people have
found that sites that frequently change their ownership find themselves put into the
sandbox. It is useless to speculate on why this happens. A much better idea is for
you to accept it and plan accordingly.
Be Nice to People and Customers
This is the final piece of the jigsaw and is both the first as well as the last thing that
you have to remember. People sometimes tend to confuse being professional with
not being nice without realizing that you can be professional and at the same time
be nice.
Being nice is not something that you should have to work at. It is supposed to come
naturally, as naturally as wishing your neighbors “Good morning”. Yet it is still
something that you should always keep in mind because with success comes an
inflated sense of your own importance, and then you will not be nice any longer.
Why this being nice is important is because if you leave aside the purely moralistic
aspect of this, it will tend to net you more money than if you are not. Just think of
yourself going out to buy something, would you rather go to a person who is nice to
you and makes you feel comfortable, or go to a place that does not. Most times even
if going to the store where you like to go takes you longer you will still want to go
there.
People online are the same; they will tend to overlook some faults on your side just
because you are nice. Over time you can build such a strong brand image that it
will become the hallmark of your website and yours can actually be a case in point
of how even a very ordinary looking website has still managed to get such a high
ranking on Google and manages to consistently hit numbers in the millions every
week.
People do not visit a site anymore because it looks nice or because the graphics are
amazing. This has become so common that there is nothing new in it. If you do go
this way you will have to introduce some change every other week and not only is
this exhausting, you will be incurring tremendous costs too.
People come to you because their browsing experience is good, and one of the best
ways of doing this is being nice. Respond to every comment that people leave. Thank
someone who wishes you well and help out someone who is asking you for it, however
inane the question is. There are many ways in which you can be nice that it is
practically impossible to tell a person how. It is just in the mindset. Many people who
are nice enough in the beginning tend to get a little abrasive once they see a bit
of success without even realizing that they have become so and it is best if you
bear this in mind.
Conclusion
Increasing traffic to your website is not an easy thing because there is no one thing
that accounts for most of the traffic. If there were two factors that accounted for 50%
of your traffic it is very easy to keep a track of it and ensure that there are no
mistakes. Unfortunately traffic depends on a lot of small things that together give you
the numbers.
If you think SEO optimization is what you need to be doing to get higher numbers,
you will be surprised to find that it is actually backfiring if you leave out on quality of
the content. If you concentrate a lot on the layout and do not spend much time
thinking about the browsing experience, you are once again not doing everything.
It is like a jigsaw that has a number of small pieces that have to mesh together,
and even if one is missing there will be a very noticeable hole in the picture.
The basics like the content, tagging, linking, and layout are the first thing that you
need to think of, but this will only let you achieve a certain amount of the potential
that your site is capable of. You will still have to market it properly which is where the
“driving traffic” comes in. Because everything is so cheap on the net when compared
to traditional marketing, your costs may be lower, but this is offset by the amount of
competition that you will have.
We have tried to give you a general idea of all the things that you will have to think of
when you start your website. The net is a dynamic place and is constantly in flux.
These tips are the basics that you need to get right while starting out. Once you
have done all this you will have to figure out innovative methods of marketing your
site to take it to the next level.
We wish you the best of luck in your venture.
