How I improved a website's traffic from 755 to 3773 (500%!!)in less than 6 months using Free Traffic
- SEO |
Hello Warriors,
Today I am excited to share one of my personal experiences with you. I do not write on the forum too often unless I have something exciting to share. Anyway, I am a SEO myself with a medium client base. One of these sites has hit 4,681 traffic in April. Of this, 3773 were unique visitors and rest were returning visitors. I know it's not a large volume yet but I am happy with the growth rate because when I initially started, the site was receiving around 700 unique visitors per month (December 2012). So that's almost 500% growth which is pretty amazing in my opinion.
I am not here to brag but thought it would be helpful to the community if I share my strategies here, especially after all the latest Google changes.
I see many people are still struggling with their site to rank higher in SERPS, this post would give them some hope and guidelines to follow.
Anyway, due to security reasons I am not going to reveal the site url exactly but here's the screenshot from the Analytics (no fluff!)
As you can see the growth steadily increasing each month and I expect it to grow more in coming months. What is even more exciting here is, I used all the free traffic resources to get the site to this stage. So I will try to cover all the steps one after another:
Leveraging the power of web2.0 properties:
This is the number one backlink method that I think of when it comes to building free backlinks. Unfortunately, many people do not know how to use these resources effectively and misuse their potential. So what I did with these sites were:
a. First, I gathered a long list of Long tail keywords surrounding my main keyword phrase. I chose keywords with at least 200 searches per month and not more than 1000 searches.
b. I created original, unique content (300-800 words) using this group of Long tail keywords and posted them on high traffic web2.0 sites 1st. Some of these sites were squidoo, blogger and wordpress. This served two purposes. One, I can use those long tail keywords as a keyword variant which creates anchor text diversity and secondly, these properties often rank in Google very easily which will send more long tail traffic to the site.
Pro tip: Make sure the sites don't impose a no follow attribute to your content page. Sites like squidoo often do this for low quality articles. You can use curated contents as well if you have lower budget
c. I also used exact match keywords sometimes within these articles.
Instead of creating new web2.0 accounts each week, I have used one account for each and published new content there in regular intervals. This way I created authority for the tier 1 sites and reduced the chances of account deletion.
d. For these top web2.0 sites I didn't use any spun content. I also did submit in other web2.0 sites but I used 1 highly spun article (5-7 Title variations, 3 sentence level spin and some word level spin finally) to those sites.
e. The key was to index the backlinks. I am sure many of you don't often check this. But this is important, If Google can't find your backlinks then it has no value. It's also true that Google doesn't always reveal all the backlinks you have. So, I plugged the backlinks in NLI (Nuclear link indexer). What it does is build backlinks to the web2.0 sites and keep track of indexing. This also means that I don't have to spend hours building tier 2 links. Sometimes I did wiki and bookmark blasts to the web2.0's as well.
Leveraging the Power of Article marketing:
Most people say article marketing doesn't work as well as it used to. Yes I do agree to some extent but it does still work. I have a sneaky way of doing this.
a. First I went to Google.com and used this nice little search string and did a Google search.
site:ezinearticles.com "weight loss" "Submitted On * *, 2012... Viewed 1000.. time"s.
b. As you can see this footprint finds all the articles in the ezineartickes.com directory that are relevant to my niche and have over a thousand views. I have also limited the publishing time to make sure they are not too old.
c. I usually looked for article views and tried to find any article that has got significant views in less than 6 months. What this tells me is, obviously that topic is trending and people are searching for similar content! so why don't I simply do it and direct this traffic to my money site?
d. Next I created some content ideas that are similar to the highest view articles and published those in ezine. Though it didn't get many views within the 3 month time period it did send more authority juice to my target domain.
e. I also published the spun version of those articles on goarticles , buzzle etc high authority sites. I didn't do any blast.
Tip: This technique may not work in all niches. You want to check for some broad term related to your target keyword.
Leveraging the power of Youtube:
What we typically do is create some animoto videos and publish them on YT for the purpose of getting a backlink from YT. But as you know the traffic potential of YT is huge, so why not use it to the fullest! Here's what I did:
a. First, I analyzed some Video keywords. To do so, I went to GAKT and looked for keywords that started with "how to", "tips," etc. I also performed google search for many other keywords to see if there's any video ranking in top 10.
b. I found 3-4 such keywords where I found YT videos were ranking. Then I went to YT and checked if any of these videos are seo optimized or not. I checked things like keyword in description, tags used etc. If these were not present then it tells me that if I can create a seo optimized YT video I will have a great chance to outrank them! It's that simple.
c. Now that I knew I can outrank these videos, the next job was to create videos. Other than creating simple animoto videos I did some research with the selected keywords and prepare a slideshow using some key points. For example: If the keyword was "how to clean your face", I would create a Powerpoint slide with something like "How to clean your face in 10 simple steps". I made sure that the slide took at least two minutes to read it out loud.
d. Then I went to fiverr and hired a voiceover talent to add voice to it! Sometimes I simply add music to it and voila! You want it to rank and be useful to drive traffic, so doing these thing will help ensure a positive viewer experience. This increases click-thru.
Pro tip: Videos that show statistics tend to work better. People trust that more. Simply make sure it adds some value to the viewer.
e. As soon as I upload the video, I spammed it with hundreds of thousands of automated backlinks using Senuke or GSA. The idea is to create a buzz around the video so that Google thinks that this video has gone viral and push it to upper pages as a result. Building automated backlinks is not harmful in this case because of the higher domain authority of YT. I think you know how fast YT video views grow for something that goes viral and it's most likely to receive tons of backlinks because most people would be sharing it like crazy!
f. I also used vagex to use grow video views but don't do it often. This way I was able to rank some videos which later drove a good amount of traffic to the site.
Leveraging the power of Social media:
The power of social media sites should be obvious to everyone by now. But there is no fool proof strategy. I am going to share only what worked for me, but I don't guarantee that it will work for you:
a. One thing I believe is that not all niches are perfect for social media. There are many boring topics to which social site users do not like to respond. So my 1st task was to identify whether the niche I am in is popular or not, in other words, if people are willing to respond in this niche. To do so, I went to facebook 1st and did a search with my keyword or a broad term in my niche.
b. This revealed many pages and groups. I investigated things like number of fans, people talking about, likes etc. I found a significant number of people are participating or interacting in the discussions which confirmed the social popularity of the niche. That's great! Next step was to hijack this traffic!
c. What I did next was created an alias (Pen name) account and customized it with all the details. I made the profile reflect my interest in the niche so that when someone looks at my profile they would be more likely to accept my invitation.
d. In the next step, I created some friends by personal invitation and joined in all the relevant Groups and pages. From there, I again invited more people whom I thought were enthusiastic about the niche.
e. I setup a fan page and customized it with logos, pictures etc. After I was accepted in the group I used the tool FB target ID and downloaded all the contact emails of those groups.
f. Next, I invited all those email contacts to join/like my Fb page! There's an option to send bulk invitation. The best part here was all the people I invited were real people and enthusiasts in the similar niche. What I found is around 40% of those responded and liked my page!! That was cool!
Pro Tip: Make sure your fan page doesn't look empty when you invite people to it. Share some interesting posts (10-15), images in your niche. This doesn't have to be your website content always. Mix n match and use common sense!
Leveraging the power of blog comments
Typically 95% blogs are no follow. So what's the point to build these backlinks? Well, I personally did this for two reasons:
1. Two build a natural looking link profile
2. Blog comments do send traffic if done properly.
So here's how I did commenting on different blogs:
a. I used scrapebox and loaded it with around 100 custom footprints to gather a large list of websites. Then removed the duplicates and sorted them by PR. Removed anything with PR n/a.
b. The above check was enough to filter a large amount of sites. I was left with couple hundred probably. Next I went to each of these blogs one by one and checked few things before I left a comment.
c. So I only left comment on blogs that matched to the following criteria:
i) If there is no earlier approved comment but the blog post looks fresh (less than 6 months old). It tells me that this blog is still fresh and active.
ii) There are earlier approved comments and they have
anchor text which confirms that I will most likely get the same.
Wow..It's getting big! I think I will stop here for now. I may come back and post the rest if you guys want me to. Hope this will help you guys. Feel free to share your thoughts!
Today I am excited to share one of my personal experiences with you. I do not write on the forum too often unless I have something exciting to share. Anyway, I am a SEO myself with a medium client base. One of these sites has hit 4,681 traffic in April. Of this, 3773 were unique visitors and rest were returning visitors. I know it's not a large volume yet but I am happy with the growth rate because when I initially started, the site was receiving around 700 unique visitors per month (December 2012). So that's almost 500% growth which is pretty amazing in my opinion.
I am not here to brag but thought it would be helpful to the community if I share my strategies here, especially after all the latest Google changes.I see many people are still struggling with their site to rank higher in SERPS, this post would give them some hope and guidelines to follow.
Anyway, due to security reasons I am not going to reveal the site url exactly but here's the screenshot from the Analytics (no fluff!)
As you can see the growth steadily increasing each month and I expect it to grow more in coming months. What is even more exciting here is, I used all the free traffic resources to get the site to this stage. So I will try to cover all the steps one after another:
Leveraging the power of web2.0 properties:
This is the number one backlink method that I think of when it comes to building free backlinks. Unfortunately, many people do not know how to use these resources effectively and misuse their potential. So what I did with these sites were:
a. First, I gathered a long list of Long tail keywords surrounding my main keyword phrase. I chose keywords with at least 200 searches per month and not more than 1000 searches.
b. I created original, unique content (300-800 words) using this group of Long tail keywords and posted them on high traffic web2.0 sites 1st. Some of these sites were squidoo, blogger and wordpress. This served two purposes. One, I can use those long tail keywords as a keyword variant which creates anchor text diversity and secondly, these properties often rank in Google very easily which will send more long tail traffic to the site.
Pro tip: Make sure the sites don't impose a no follow attribute to your content page. Sites like squidoo often do this for low quality articles. You can use curated contents as well if you have lower budget
c. I also used exact match keywords sometimes within these articles.
Instead of creating new web2.0 accounts each week, I have used one account for each and published new content there in regular intervals. This way I created authority for the tier 1 sites and reduced the chances of account deletion.
d. For these top web2.0 sites I didn't use any spun content. I also did submit in other web2.0 sites but I used 1 highly spun article (5-7 Title variations, 3 sentence level spin and some word level spin finally) to those sites.
e. The key was to index the backlinks. I am sure many of you don't often check this. But this is important, If Google can't find your backlinks then it has no value. It's also true that Google doesn't always reveal all the backlinks you have. So, I plugged the backlinks in NLI (Nuclear link indexer). What it does is build backlinks to the web2.0 sites and keep track of indexing. This also means that I don't have to spend hours building tier 2 links.
Sometimes I did wiki and bookmark blasts to the web2.0's as well.Leveraging the Power of Article marketing:
Most people say article marketing doesn't work as well as it used to. Yes I do agree to some extent but it does still work. I have a sneaky way of doing this.
a. First I went to Google.com and used this nice little search string and did a Google search.
site:ezinearticles.com "weight loss" "Submitted On * *, 2012... Viewed 1000.. time"s.
b. As you can see this footprint finds all the articles in the ezineartickes.com directory that are relevant to my niche and have over a thousand views. I have also limited the publishing time to make sure they are not too old.
c. I usually looked for article views and tried to find any article that has got significant views in less than 6 months. What this tells me is, obviously that topic is trending and people are searching for similar content! so why don't I simply do it and direct this traffic to my money site?
d. Next I created some content ideas that are similar to the highest view articles and published those in ezine. Though it didn't get many views within the 3 month time period it did send more authority juice to my target domain.
e. I also published the spun version of those articles on goarticles , buzzle etc high authority sites. I didn't do any blast.
Tip: This technique may not work in all niches. You want to check for some broad term related to your target keyword.
Leveraging the power of Youtube:
What we typically do is create some animoto videos and publish them on YT for the purpose of getting a backlink from YT. But as you know the traffic potential of YT is huge, so why not use it to the fullest! Here's what I did:
a. First, I analyzed some Video keywords. To do so, I went to GAKT and looked for keywords that started with "how to", "tips," etc. I also performed google search for many other keywords to see if there's any video ranking in top 10.
b. I found 3-4 such keywords where I found YT videos were ranking. Then I went to YT and checked if any of these videos are seo optimized or not. I checked things like keyword in description, tags used etc. If these were not present then it tells me that if I can create a seo optimized YT video I will have a great chance to outrank them! It's that simple.
c. Now that I knew I can outrank these videos, the next job was to create videos. Other than creating simple animoto videos I did some research with the selected keywords and prepare a slideshow using some key points. For example: If the keyword was "how to clean your face", I would create a Powerpoint slide with something like "How to clean your face in 10 simple steps". I made sure that the slide took at least two minutes to read it out loud.
d. Then I went to fiverr and hired a voiceover talent to add voice to it! Sometimes I simply add music to it and voila! You want it to rank and be useful to drive traffic, so doing these thing will help ensure a positive viewer experience. This increases click-thru.
Pro tip: Videos that show statistics tend to work better. People trust that more. Simply make sure it adds some value to the viewer.
e. As soon as I upload the video, I spammed it with hundreds of thousands of automated backlinks using Senuke or GSA. The idea is to create a buzz around the video so that Google thinks that this video has gone viral and push it to upper pages as a result. Building automated backlinks is not harmful in this case because of the higher domain authority of YT. I think you know how fast YT video views grow for something that goes viral and it's most likely to receive tons of backlinks because most people would be sharing it like crazy!
f. I also used vagex to use grow video views but don't do it often. This way I was able to rank some videos which later drove a good amount of traffic to the site.
Leveraging the power of Social media:
The power of social media sites should be obvious to everyone by now. But there is no fool proof strategy. I am going to share only what worked for me, but I don't guarantee that it will work for you:
a. One thing I believe is that not all niches are perfect for social media. There are many boring topics to which social site users do not like to respond. So my 1st task was to identify whether the niche I am in is popular or not, in other words, if people are willing to respond in this niche. To do so, I went to facebook 1st and did a search with my keyword or a broad term in my niche.
b. This revealed many pages and groups. I investigated things like number of fans, people talking about, likes etc. I found a significant number of people are participating or interacting in the discussions which confirmed the social popularity of the niche. That's great! Next step was to hijack this traffic!
c. What I did next was created an alias (Pen name) account and customized it with all the details. I made the profile reflect my interest in the niche so that when someone looks at my profile they would be more likely to accept my invitation.
d. In the next step, I created some friends by personal invitation and joined in all the relevant Groups and pages. From there, I again invited more people whom I thought were enthusiastic about the niche.
e. I setup a fan page and customized it with logos, pictures etc. After I was accepted in the group I used the tool FB target ID and downloaded all the contact emails of those groups.
f. Next, I invited all those email contacts to join/like my Fb page! There's an option to send bulk invitation. The best part here was all the people I invited were real people and enthusiasts in the similar niche. What I found is around 40% of those responded and liked my page!! That was cool!
Pro Tip: Make sure your fan page doesn't look empty when you invite people to it. Share some interesting posts (10-15), images in your niche. This doesn't have to be your website content always. Mix n match and use common sense!
Leveraging the power of blog comments
Typically 95% blogs are no follow. So what's the point to build these backlinks? Well, I personally did this for two reasons:
1. Two build a natural looking link profile
2. Blog comments do send traffic if done properly.
So here's how I did commenting on different blogs:
a. I used scrapebox and loaded it with around 100 custom footprints to gather a large list of websites. Then removed the duplicates and sorted them by PR. Removed anything with PR n/a.
b. The above check was enough to filter a large amount of sites. I was left with couple hundred probably. Next I went to each of these blogs one by one and checked few things before I left a comment.
c. So I only left comment on blogs that matched to the following criteria:
i) If there is no earlier approved comment but the blog post looks fresh (less than 6 months old). It tells me that this blog is still fresh and active.
ii) There are earlier approved comments and they have
anchor text which confirms that I will most likely get the same.
Wow..It's getting big! I think I will stop here for now. I may come back and post the rest if you guys want me to. Hope this will help you guys. Feel free to share your thoughts!
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