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 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.

I was talking to a client today about the amount of copy they have on their website. From an SEO perspective I know more copy is better, but then there is the design aspect. I hate sites with tons of copy. I think it’s overwhelming for the visitor, and can often be a quick turn-off. Or, maybe I am just a doe-doe who likes to look at lots of pretty pictures.

I suggested putting a lot of the copy into neat bullet points. There are several advantages to this approach.

1.    Bullet points are much easier for the eye and brain to absorb
2.    From a design perspective they usually look nice
3.    It allows you to bold keywords or phrases which help with SEO

Overall, the main advantage to using bullet points instead of paragraphs is for the visitor. In general people like reading lists instead of paragraphs. It allows busy folks to get what they need and go. So if your copy is long but important, try creating a few bulleted lists like; a product features list, benefits, point of differences, common concerns… you get the point.

Every month or so (no one really knows for sure) all of the major search engines re-index the cyber world. They send out “spiders” to scan all of the websites in their index and hunt for new content. This is your opportunity as a website publisher to feed the spiders something new. It’s very important for search engine rankings that the spiders find updated pages when they get to your site. That doesn’t mean you have to go nuts redesigning the site every month, but you should be in the habit of changing a bit of copy on your various pages. An easy way to do this is to have content that would normally change frequently, such as news items, or a “feature of the week” sort of thing.

Stale content on your site will eventually bring the whole thing down. The search engines will give your site less and less relevance because it doesn’t see the site being updated or maintained. Don’t let this happen to you! Of, course when refreshing your content every so often, don’t forget those all important keywords!