Well, it’s one of those slow Tuesdays, when my motivation is a bit low, and the list of things I have to do is a bit high. So today I figured I would think about some different ways to drive quality traffic to a website…

1. On all of your content (or product pages) add a “Send to Friend” function, so a user can easily click a button and email a link to your content to someone else. Every time I have added this functionality for a client, they have received many quality hits from people who never would have found the site. This functionality is a MUST for web merchants to have on all of their product pages. Remember, a referral from a friend is the most valuable and credible way to promote your product.

2. Contests are also a great way of driving traffic. The one mistake people tend to make with contests is they do not make the offer (prize) compelling enough. Offer a good discount on your product or service, and you will get people buzzing.

3. How-To’s make great content. Any time you post instruction on how to solve a common problem you’re going to get a lot of inbound links from other sites, and of course, traffic.

4. My father-in-law emails me nearly everyday with a joke or humorous story he found online. This type of content is always good to get people to link to you, or send your link to their friend. Though it does not work as well for merchants, it’s a great strategy for bloggers. If I had something funny to say, I would put it on my blog, but sorry, I have nothing.

Sharing content on the web is a huge opportunity that your site needs to be leveraging. Sites like StumbleUpon, Myspace, Facebook, and others make it easy and fun for users to share content. Make it EASY for your site visitors to either link to your content, or send it to someone. This is the best way to insure lots of buzz and traffic.

I found this statistic interesting. It was taken from a course that SEMPO offers on search engine optimization, though I don’t have the original source.

CONTENT THAT IS SHARED THE MOST ONLINE
Jokes – 88%
News – 56%
Medical Info – 32%

I am a fairly new user of StumbleUpon but I must say, it’s really cool. If I am bored or want to find something different I click the Stumble button on my browser toolbar, and I’m off! A lot of what you come across is crap, but every once in a while you find something cool.

I have used StumbleUpon to promote my own blog and it seems to be driving good traffic every day. They also have a neat advertising program that allows you to get quick traffic to your site for about 5 cents per impression (not visit).

Anyway, I came across this neat site. It allows you to highlight text on any website and send it to someone. So, if I found something interesting buried deep in a forum, I could highlight the good part, and send a link directly to it. Try it out.

I was talking to a fellow seo guru yesterday and he was telling me about the decreasing relevancy of meta tags in effecting search engine positioning. I strongly disagreed, but you know the old saying, opinions are like a-holes…. everybody’s got one, and they all stink.

It is true, that meta tags do not play as significant a role in determining rankings as they used to. This is because all of the non-credible seo’s were keyword stuffing and adding lots of useless junk in the meta section, so of course the search engines responded.

However, as my graphic shows, your title tag appears in most SERPS, as does whatever content appears at the top of the page. If you are a blogger, you’ll find that whatever your recent post was at the time the search engine robots came by will appear in the SEARPS. For the rest of you, it is unusually whatever your northern most content is. This is why many website will include some text about their website at the very top. This is especially important for sites with a lot of flash or images.

The point here is that you’re not going to get to #1 in the search engines by playing with your meta tags alone. However, you should not ignore their relevance. Be sure to write short, powerful titles for all of your pages, as well as a unique description. Your keyword tag should ONLY contain keywords that are relevant to that one page (not the entire site), and should preferably match some of the words used in the description and title.

Okay, I haven’t posted in about a week. Followers of my blog know that’s unusual for me. So what the hell have I been doing? Well, I learned a lesson this week, so I figured I would share it with my readers (assuming I have any). Plus, I thought a few of you out there may be able to relate.

I was looking to have a site of mine re-designed. The project required some pretty sophisticated PHP programming. I know PHP, but not enough for a project of this scope. So, I decided to outsource this job. I posted an ad on craigslist.com to solicit bids for the project. Almost immediately I received bids from all over. Most designers wanted about $1,000 for the job, except one. This one person who ran a web design firm in India was willing to do it for $400. It seemed like a great deal to me. They had everything… a professional website, a good profile and portfolio, what else do you need? Oh yeah, testimonials! They didn’t have those.

After a few weeks they completed the project. It looked ok, but technically, it didn’t work very well. I had so many technical issues that this past week I scrapped the site and put up my old one! So, I lost $400 to find out that there is value in using a trusted source. I’ve learned this lesson before, but I guess money was the motivating factor in going against my better judgment.

This lesson can be applied to all aspects of life, but it is especially important in ecommerce. Most small merchants cannot afford to have their site down, or suffer from major technical issues. So I say, if you’re going to do it, do it right. Oh, and make sure the bastards have testimonials or references.

One of the most important components of any effective SEO/SEM campaign is keyword research. It also happens to be one of the more tedious tasks out there. In a future post I am going to show you how to create a nice keyword spreadsheet that will allow you to evaluate and grade your keywords. For now, concentrate on your most important keywords and check out a cool tool at Google. It’s called Google Trends.

This is only ONE tool out there for keyword research. There is also the better known, Overture Keyword tool, and several others. Most of these just give you an idea of traffic for each particular word. What I like about Google Trends is that it breaks it out by geography, which allows you to effective geo-target with your Google Adwords account.