SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Web Traffic, Blogging, Site Search Traffic
Web Traffic: 13 Ethical Ways To Increase Your Site's Search Traffic (Mashable)
Web Traffic: 13 Ethical Ways to Increase Your Site's Search Traffic (Mashable)

Running a business without an ad is like winking at a beautiful girl in the dark, she won't see or notice you. Having an online presence and not getting search or web traffic is even worse. Here are a few search traffic tips to help you get the desired web traffic.

If you have a product you're really proud of, it should speak for itself. But when it comes down to it, you still need to get customers on your website in the first place — especially if you're running an e-commerce operation.

See Also: 8 Tips for Small Business Homepage Design

We asked a panel of 13 successful entrepreneurs to share their best advice for generating high-quality, organic search traffic to their business websites. Here's what they had to say:

1. Focus on the Long Tail
If you are a new site, it can be difficult to go after popular keywords right away. I find it better to write many quality articles on very specific keywords than to go after the ones with more search traffic. A great benefit of staying focused with long-tail key terms is that they usually convert better, as well. To help with this, I recommend a tool called HitTail, which drives targeted search visitors to your website by focusing on the most promising organic keywords in your existing traffic.

- Lawrence Watkins, Great Black Speakers

2. Stick Around
The longer you are in business and producing quality online content, the more likely you are to pop up in search results for all related keywords. Starting a blog or churning out a bunch of articles is all fine and good, but keeping those activities going for years as opposed to months (or weeks) makes a huge difference.

3. Optimize Your Articles
There are three main ingredients to a successfully optimized web page or article: your meta title, description and keywords. This is such a simple thing to fill out when you're publishing a piece of content on your site, so take the time to do it each time, and you'll start to rank for your keywords much faster.

- Nathalie Lussier, The Website Checkup Tool
4. Don't Forget About (Ethical) Link Building
Keyword-embedded links are the foundation of off-page search engine optimization. The best part is that links can be free. Just ask vendors, partners, press, clients, your alma mater and any other credible source that you interact with to embed hyperlinked keywords back to your site for the terms that you are targeting. If the referring source has a high page rank, you should see a pop in your rankings in less than two months of them being published.

- Christopher Kelly, Convene

5. Use Google's Keyword Tool
Use Google's Keyword Tool to find long-tail keywords that are not as competitive, then structure some content around those. If you are in a competitive niche, this is a way you can start building up some small recurring traffic and engage your users.

- Patrick Curtis, WallStreetOasis.com
6. Provide Amazing Value to Your Readers
When it comes to increasing organic search, content marketing through blogging or guest posts is the fastest way to build great traffic. However, content marketing is a quality game and not a quantity game. If you have horrible content, people won't bother reading it or sharing it, which is basically the entire point of building a company blog. Therefore, when I write content, I constantly ask myself if I would take ten minutes out of my day to read it and if I'd share it with others. If you wouldn't do either of those things, then you really need to look at your content strategy again.

- Liam Martin, Staff.com

7. Don't Try to Outsmart Google
Gaming Google's system might work temporarily, but it is not a good strategy for the long haul. To increase organic search traffic, produce top-notch content that's relevant to what your users might be searching. Check the Google Keyword Tool to make sure you're using the correct terminology that the general public is using when they're searching.

- Sarah Schupp, UniversityParent

8. Think of SEO as an Opportunity to Create Value
SEO isn't a game. At least it's not a game that you'll win in the long run if you think of it as a game. Create content that readers find valuable and Google will deem search-worthy. Visitors are more likely to share content that they enjoyed reading and will stay on your site longer, while bloggers and the media might use your site as a reference, which means more organic links.

- Danny Wong, Blank Label
9. Decrease Bounce Rate
If there is one thing search engines hate, it is a high bounce rate. Check your keywords for this, and optimize those pages to reduce your bounce rate. Search engines will love you for it.

- Adam Lieb, Duxter

10. Produce Quality Content
Search engines are rewarding people and companies who are getting high-quality, consistent content coming from them. Things such as author rank are going to have a big effect on organic search results. Put a plan in place to not only create content to publish online, but also to be able to maximize the value of the content so that it is properly distributed across social channels and has a chance to go viral.

- John Hall, Influence & Co.
11. Create a Company Blog to Increase SEO Traffic
SEO is king in organic search traffic. The more popular search terms within your niche that you include on your website, the more searches will organically lead to your site. But including too much text on the main pages of your site can do more harm than good, which makes it difficult for consumers to find the information they want. Instead of overwriting the copy on your homepage, about page and product pages, start a separate blog for additional SEO work. Use the blog to write about your niche, whether it's construction, beauty or entertainment. Try to do keyword research to find out which phrases are trending in your industry and include them in the blog posts. As long as your blog has a highly visible link back to the main page of the website, the blog will increase your visibility.

- Jay Wu, A Forever Recovery

12. Leverage Industry Experts
Everyone likes opining as an expert. You'll be surprised how easily you can convince industry leaders to contribute guest posts to your own blog. They will likely have their own readerships, and those people will become familiar with your brand. The experts are also likely to produce great written content that will be of great interest to your existing users.

- Chuck Cohn, Varsity Tutors
13. Create a Community
Increasing Google traffic is all about answering questions your community finds important. You need to become the authority in your niche. Have your community ask you questions, and you'll be well on your way to providing high-quality, valuable and useful content. That's what Google cares about. When you provide answers to your community's questions, Google will rank your site well for many keyword terms you wouldn't have been able to think of on your own. You create loyalty in your community and rank well in Google at the same time. That's a win-win.

- Mitch Gordon, Go Overseas



Post Credits
Post Arthur: Scott Gerber

Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottgerber

Bots Infection, Web Traffic, Adweek, Solve Media, Internet, Internet Advertising
Web Traffic: Bots Infecting Nearly Half of Web Traffic, Per Report (Adweek)
Web Traffic: Bots Infecting Nearly Half of Web Traffic, Per Report (Adweek)

 According to Solve Media, advertisers could blow close to $10 billion in 2013. If you are a glass half full-type of person, you might want to emphasize that 54 percent of Web advertising is not suspicious, as is 65 percent of mobile advertising.

If you are a glass-half-empty person, you might be concerned that the online ad industry has a serious and growing credibility problem. Worse than credibility being lost—advertisers are potentially blowing $9.5 billion this year on on non-humans.

That’s because according to Solve Media, the bot problem is getting worse. In the second quarter of this year, Solve found that 46 percent of Web advertising exhibits suspicious activity, up from 43 percent in Q1. Similarly, 35 percent of mobile ads in Q2 were suspect, according to Solve’s data, up from 29 percent during the previous quarter.

The company's’ latest Bot Traffic Market Advisory also found that video advertising is seeing an alarming rise in bot traffic, something that Adweek has also reported.

Solve Media isn’t a bot-tracking company per se; the firm’s technology powers CAPTCHAs—those Web interfaces that require you to spell obscure words to prove you are not a robot. Solve also sells ads within the CAPTCHAs it powers.

Many in the industry will debate the severity of the bot problem, and some would question just how much visibility Solve’s CAPTCHA footprint affords it. For its part, the fast growing company claims to track 230 million human verifications across over 6,500 publishers across the globe.

Speaking of the globe, if you think the U.S. has a bot problem (43 percent of Web ads are suspect, per Solve), just look East. According to Solve’s data, a stunning 92 percent of China’s Web traffic is suspicious. Venezuela (80 percent) and Ukraine (77 percent) also exhibit alarming bot patterns, while Singapore leads when it comes to suspicious mobile traffic (86 percent).

“Protecting website publishers from automated submissions, spam, attacks, and other types of fraudulent activity must become a crucial industry priority,” said Adam J. O’Donnell, chief architect, cloud technology Group at Sourcefire and Solve Media security council member.

Post Credits
Post Arthur: Mike Shields

Web Traffic: Yahoo Overtakes Google In US Web Traffic (Telegraph)
Web Traffic: Yahoo Overtakes Google In US Web Traffic (Telegraph)
Web Traffic: Yahoo overtakes Google in US Web Traffic (Telegraph)

Yahoo Websites Attracted More US Visitors Than Google In July, According To The Most Recent Internet Traffic Numbers. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer noted last month that traffic to Yahoo sites was growing

Confounding analysts' predictions, Yahoo sites attracted 196.6 million unique visitors last month, giving it the biggest audience of any US-based web property and overtaking Google for the first time since May 2011, according to analytics company comScore.

Yahoo's unique visitors were up 21 per cent compared to July of last year, when it came in third behind Google and Microsoft. During the same period, Google sites, (including YouTube), attracted 192.3 million unique visitors, up less than 1 per cent.

Microsoft made third place in July, with 179.6 million unique visitors, followed by Facebook with 142.3 million and AOL with 117.4 million.

Although this is largely symbolic achievement for Yahoo, the news will be welcomed by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who joined in July 2012 and recently laid out the company’s plans to remodel itself in the image of Google.

In an earnings call last month, which revealed mixed results, Mayer noted that page views were rising after more than a year of declines, citing recently refreshed versions of Yahoo mail, weather, sports, news and Tumblr, both on desktop and mobile.

However, the comScore figures do not include Tumblr, (the social networking website Yahoo purchased last year), which pulled in 38.4 million unique visitors of its own in July. They also do not include mobile traffic, according to comScore, which is significant given that Google is still much stronger than Yahoo in mobile.

The figures have raised a few eyebrows among industry commentators, but comScore's Andrew Lipsman told Forbes that Yahoo has never been far behind Google in terms of traffic, so the gain is probably due to seasonal or month-to-month variations.

The figures reflect only the number of visitors to each of the company's various websites, and not how many people use their search engines. Google continues to dominate in search, with 67 per cent of the market in June, according to comScore. Microsoft Bing is ranked second with 17 per cent, followed by Yahoo with 12 per cent.

Yahoo's real challenge is monetising its traffic. Revenues from display advertising, which is still Yahoo's main source of revenue, fell 11 per cent in the second quarter of 2013 to $423 million, and the company has been forced to cut its full-year earnings-and-sales forecast.

“Yahoo owns lots of destination sites – places where people spend lots of time but aren't necessarily looking for anything in particular – whereas Google dominates search, and is able to serve up very relevant advertising and make lots of money in the process,” said Jan Dawson, Chief Telecoms Analyst at Ovum.

“Yahoo needs to find ways to increase the value of its advertising so that it can start to grow revenues and profits again in a big way.”

Post Credits
Post Site: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Post Arthur: Sophie Curtis

Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/scurtsy