SEO Realities: Think Beyond Organic Searches

Like everything in life nothing comes for free. Websites want views. You can’t sell advertising or sell a product if no one knows about it. You can either buy traffic or try to grow it organically.

Organic traffic refers to being found with natural keywords. For instance if you are looking for computers and you type into a search engine “buy computers” what comes up on the first page? I’ll tell you what comes up and save you the search. Best Buy, New Egg, Amazon, PCWorld and Intel are the ones that stood out to me and there were a few others as well. Dell a major supplier of computers did not show up until page 4. Organic traffic as you can see can be hard to get.

There are a number of factors that create a good organic search. The most direct site name is a good start. The key words in the niche are a good starting point. Optimizing images counts in Google searches as well. The number of links coming into you page helps as well. Regular posting to keep the site updated also is taken into consideration by Google. There are a number of don’t to consider as well and these far outweigh the do’s. Don’t buy links from a link farm. Don’t use key words that have nothing to do with your site to get more hits. For instance, if you are selling cars don’t try to sneak in a celebrity name to get more traffic. Search engines can generally recognize this and drop your rankings. Slow loading pages are penalized too.

So if you look at this list there is a lot of work in preparing a page to get to the top of Google's rankings. How many of those companies I mentioned above have full time web marketers just looking for ways to tweak a word here or there just to ensure high rankings? All of them. That’s why you are lucky to get on the top 10 pages of Google let alone page 1. Yes it can be done and it usually involves finding a low volume niche where there is little competition for the top spot. Only 200,000 to 300,000 sites are found in a search instead of over a billion. You will keep tweaking your key words and adding content and over the course of several months you may end up on the coveted page one of Google.

Now I want you to think about how much time and money you have invested in getting there. Countless hours, If you are a part-timer like most you have been putting in about 12 hours a week every week for a year minus a little bit of time off. That is if you treat your website like a business. That means you have easily put in over 500 hours or ¼ of a year’s work. At minimum wage that is over $5000.00

What about buying clicks? Not from some scammer but legitimate clicks. CPM or CPT (cost per 1000 impressions) can be a powerful tool if you over deliver on your promises. You can often buy 1000 impressions for $ 0.005 each or $5.00 per 1000. If you action 2% of the readers to join your mail list and assume that on average each reader is worth $1.00 per year That should realize $20.00 per year in revenue from the 20 people that joined your email list. The 1000 impressions netted you $15.00. You would have to keep statistics you’re your own business but what I present here should be a conservative value. Google is the largest CPM provider but there are several others as well. Investigate where the impressions show up. Caveat Emptor!

I use a program called Social Oomph to track my clicks out of twitter. If you have something useful to say use it and you will get a lot of clicks through to your website, article or whatever. My recent clicks counted from Social Oomph range from 240-340 per day. If I load up my tweet account with them I can get and keep a steady pace I can expect 7000 clicks per month. Since I try to make my tweets reader centred not all of those tweets go to my site but at a large portion do. I also have an auto responder set up so I can suggest people go over and view my Facebook page when they follow me on Twitter and that has grown my Facebook page by 100 followers in the last 7 days. Social Oomph has 3 levels, free, moderate services and full services. It’s about $300-$400 a year if you need the paid services but I suggest starting with the free to see how you like it. So that is one way you can get clicks to your website and a fair number of them too I might add. Now I haven’t started to leverage this yet but it could turn out to be very interesting. Stay tuned!

In conclusion there are several ways besides organic searches to drive traffic to your site and ultimately to your email list. Provide good solid content for your reader and give them some tantalizing bits along the way and you should be on your way to a website that is in the money.