We are frequently asked about social media and how to use these “Web2.0″ sites to get web traffic.
The fact is you can intelligently apply social media sites to get good, targeted traffic although you need to take care. Increasingly these sites - Squiddo being the latest – are clamping down on crap content sites designed to push “optimized” content into them just to create backlinks.
Sure, backlinks are key and particularly if you’re using a high Page Rank site, even if you’re only operating a lens that no-one reads. But times theya re a-changing and our mantra is to “deliver quality content” rather than keyword-stuffed social media BS.
Pay per click tactics can be a great way of getting visitors to your page who are eager to buy what you are selling, but this can be costly and a source of financial ruin if you don’t know exactly what you are doing and so social media and blogging remain a great way to generate a targeted audience for your content.
Traditional SEO, or search engine optimization, is now far too competitive for the average website to compete on a level playing field. The top search results are now being dominated by social media and bookmarking sites, but the good news is that you can use these very site to promote your website and get a lot of free web site traffic.
There are a lot that can be used to create backlinks and your own on-site blogs that in turn will get picked up by the search engines, but these are sites that you need to also treat with respect. For instance, as with forum posts, you do not want to go about posting obviously spammy content. Deliver value and you will get value re-delivered to your website.
As we’ve said before the first step to getting agood volume of free website traffic is keyword research. Using the free Google adwords keyword tool, as well as other keyword tools like the free version of wordtracker, you can quickly build a list of keywords that people are actually typing in the search engines to find what your website is about.
When you have found some keywords with a good amount of traffic go over to Google search and search for the keyword, enclosing it in quotation marks. You are looking for keywords that come back with less than 500,000 results, when enclosed in quotes. Do this for all keywords that you identified as having good search traffic.
You’ll then start to begin to understand the keywords you should be using. We’ve got a lot more to say about this – so stay tuned. And check the resources at BestWebTrafficTools.com too if you’re wanting to know more about using social media to get web traffic.
