Diversify Your Traffic - Web Directories
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. It's the age old saying that
encourages you to mitigate your risk by spreading yourself out instead
of relying on one thing only. Ask any stock broker and they'll tell you
putting all your money in one company is very risky and is rarely the
right move. When you only rely on one source, if something bad should
happen you have nothing else to fall back on. At the end of the day,
most people would agree this is basic common sense.
Enter the google era, where many webmasters seem to have tossed this conventional logic
aside in favour of a Google-tunnel-vision. It is true that Google is
the most popular search engine
in the world today reaching 380 million unique users per month.
According to ComScore Media Metrix they have a 42.3% share of the
search market. These numbers should make webmasters stand up and pay
attention, but it should not make them neglect everything else.
Many SEOs (search engine optimizers) will exclusively talk about
obtaining a high ranking in Google, as if that is the one and only way
to drive traffic on the web. Other SEOs see the web in a larger sense
and, instead, treat Google as one piece of the puzzle (albeit an
important piece). The good SEOs recognize that while most searches may
originate at Google, there are a lot of potential website visitors and
customers coming from other engines that deserve some attention too.
Fortunately, many of the search engines determine the importance of a
site using similar criteria, so optimizing for one engine should give
you a boost in all the others as well. But if your SEO is giving you
ranking reports that only say Google, it may be time to start asking
where you rank in the other engines. After all, no webmaster is
prepared to say that a customer coming from a website other than Google
is a customer they don't want!
List Yourself in Web Directories
Your website traffic and customers can come from all over, so you
want to make sure that wherever customers looking, they'll find you.
There are a lot of different web directories on the Internet.
Some catalogue all sorts of sites, while others focus on a particular
niche market. By taking just a little bit of time you can launch a web
directory campaign that gets you listed in all the directories your
potential visitors may use. Best of all, many web directories will let
you submit your site for free, so this is a cost-effective way to
generate targeted traffic. The best directories are those that offer a
direct link back to your site. This way, your directory campaign also
becomes a link-building campaign, and you boost your ranking on most
search engines, including Google. (Two birds with one stone, not too
shabby!)
Find Those Niche Sites
The web was built based on links. It's how web surfers move from
one site to another, following an endless flow of information. You need
to take advantage of this by making sure that your site is linked to
along this path. If you are selling t-shirts, try to find a site that
is dedicated to the topic of t-shirts (or fashion, in this instance).
In this day and age, you are almost guaranteed to find a site with
t-shirt resources. Look for ways you can generate a link to your site
from theirs. If you have some marketing dollars to spend, you may be
able to buy text or banner advertising, which will also provide a link
back to your site. You can send a quick, polite email to the webmaster
requesting to trade links (after all, that sites wants links too!), or
maybe you can contribute content somehow and include a link to your
site in your author bio. There are a lot of different approaches you
can take, and as long as you end up getting a link to your site, you'll
increase the likelihood of attracting visitors who are following that
information path.
The world wide web is a big place and it's only getting bigger. You
should devote a good amount of resources to the more important traffic
drivers, like Google, but you should not fall into a trap where that's
the only thing you can rely on. By diversifying your incoming traffic
resources and listing yourself in web directories, you will be better
prepared for what the future may bring.
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