Traffic Generation Strategy for Websites:What I learned from 5 Years of SEO

By +Mina Adly Younan 

I asked myself what 5 years of experience in SEO has taught me to answer this Ultimate Question: 

How to Generate Traffic To a Website? 

To generate Traffic to any website, that is of course offering a good fresh and uniqe content, one needs to invest in:

1. Onsite SEO
2. Offsite Seo
3. Social Media
4. Link baits
5. Traffic bank
6. PPC and PPM for a specific Exact Match List of Keywords and Placements
7. Brand Reputation Management (BRM)
8. Monitoring and Analysis

1- OnSite Seo Tactics:

The Onsite SEO tasks vary between already developed and running websites and New Websites that have not been created yet. But the first thing that should be studied before doing anything is to identify a List of the Strategic Keywords and Phrases.

For Old Websites we need to fully audit the website and make a list of all onsite tasks to fix with the help of the website developers. These tasks include but are not limited to:

1. Sitemap
2. Broken Links
3. 404 Navigation
4. Site speed
5. Meta tags (Titles, Description, Headers, URLs, Alt image, Microformats, etc.)
6. Interlinking (and Anchor text)
7. Mobile Optimization and Responsive Design
8. Social Media buttons
9. RSS feeds and newsletter subscriptions
10. Contact us page (for Local Business)

 For new websites, the developer should have the previous list to make sure that the website is SEO’ed then whoever is responsible of the website content should create it witrh respect to the Meta Elements.

2- OffSite SEO Tactics:

A dedicated Team or member should manage the website Seo through “submissions”:

Such Submissions should be natural and only through sites with quality pages and high authority.

Types of Submissions are:

1. Article Marketing (Eg: Alltop, technorati, Ezinearticles, Squido, etc.)
2. Video Submissions( Eg: YouTube, Vimeo, metacafe, TubeMoguletc.)
3. Infographic Submissions
4. Wikis and How To sites
5. Directories submissions (with PR 3 at least)
6. Forums participation
7. 3- Link Bait
8. It is simply about creating that kind of content that other blogs or sites like to share like:
9. How To articles
10. Guides
11. Top lists
12. Trends
13. infographics
14. Short Animated Videos
15. Reviews
16. Comparisons

4- Traffic Bank:

Investing in a traffic bank is a must do strategy for any online agency. Such bank is simply a network of websites or even a Big website that is well-invested in through content, design, and advertising (online and offline).

This website (or network) will be used to support new products and clients through mentions, ads, blogs, or links. Ergo, drive them direct organic traffic.

5- Social Media

Social Media is divided into three main tactics:

1. Social Bookmarking submissions; which is the same task done in offsite seo bu on Social bookmarks like Reddit, Pinterest, stumble upon, delicious, dig, tweetmeme, friendfeed, diigo, scoop it, Socialmaker, etc.)
2. Community Management: A community manager is an online representative who comes with ideas, games, competitions, promos, new catchy stuff to share, to grab the social media fans to the page and make them interact. Such a representative will be a trusted source of information and can easily drive traffic to new content pages.
3. Social Channels Update: It should be out of question that any created content should be live on the main social media channels (facebook, twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus, and Tumblr) either by an individual or automatically through RSS.

6- PPC and PPM

Although Pay per click and Pay Per impression is money consuming but if it is done wisely, it will be profitable. The best way to do it if you don’t have any special events or products is to select a very narrow set of keywords and placements (websites ad spaces) and target them. Try to be noticed every now and then.  

You do not necessarily have to use Adwords or Bing Ad Center, there are tons of other Ad servers, or you can even contact any website and have your banners on their pages for weigh less than you will pay for Google and Microsoft)

Use Remarketing and Ad Exchange, if you are selling products and want to target clients who have visited you before and showed some interest in your business.

Investing in Press releases also pays off. So, when you have a valued content don’t hesitate to let the Professionals talk about it (there are PRweb, market wire, etc.)

7- Brand Reputation Management

Finally, you cannot run an online Business without BRM.

1. Add a review to your site, service, or products
2. Watch out your mentions on search engines and Social media through Brand Monitoring (there are tens of tools to do that)
3. Watch out your competitors mentions and don’t let them grab more attention over you.

8- Monitoring and Analysis:

All the Above efforts will cost you a lot of time and money and you need to know which tactic is profitable to you and which is not? Which channel is driving traffic, leads, or conversions, and which are blocked? And above all, which properties (sites) you have deserve to be maintained and which need to be executed to focus on more valued one.