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25

More Website Traffic Through Diversification

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Table of contents for More Website Traffic

  1. More Website Traffic Through Diversification

As you know, there are any number of ways to get more website traffic. While it can be helpful to talk about some of the specific ways to do this, it can be difficult to decide where to spend your time. There are only so many hours in the day, so you want to make your website promotion efforts count.

Where do I spend my time (and money)? If you read all the emails and sales letters from the gurus and wanna be gurus, everyone is trying to sell you the answer to exactly that question. If you fall into the hype trap, you’ll buy everything they sell. I mean, many of the ideas they have sound like good ones, right? What to do?

Well, on that note, I’m developing a free series on "more website traffic" showing you how to make the right decisions on which methods to use to increase your traffic. When confronted with the question, "where should I spend my time developing free traffic?" you can use these concepts to make your decision. We’ll start with the concept of diversification.

Diversification, as applied to getting more website traffic, comes in two forms. First, is the diversification of keywords, and second is the diversification of sources. These concepts are pretty simple to understand, but often people ignore their importance when determining what steps to take to increase their audience. Understanding these concepts will help you spread what I call your traffic risk.

 

Diversification of Keywords:  Diversification of keywords is pretty straight forward. How many keywords is your site found for in a given month? 1,000? 10,000? More?

At the most basic level, if your site is found for at least 10,000 keywords in the search engines, then that’s at least 10,000 visits (assuming one visit per keyword search) per month. What if your site is found for 20,000 keywords? 30,000? And so on.

The more keywords your site is found for, the more stable your traffic will be. If you’re relying heavily on a few keywords to get the majority of traffic to your site, then what happens if your site stops ranking so well for those words? A majority of your traffic is at risk.

I’ve said this elsewhere before, but traffic has a personality. Until your site is found for a certain number of keywords (what that number is may be different for each site, and even each page), the full personality of your traffic is not developed. As you get more traffic from a more diverse set of keywords, your visitor base improves, and so does your income.

 

Diversification of Sources:  Diversification of sources deals with how many different traffic sources you have. We can divide traffic source into major categories.

The first category division is free vs. paid.

Imagine a site that gets little to no free search engine traffic, and little to no traffic from referring sites. In order to succeed, this site will have buy traffic. Having to buy traffic will significantly increase costs, and therefore decrease the bottom line for this site.

Imagine instead a site that gets thousands of visitors a month in free traffic. That site is, by and large, going to be less expensive to operate, and therefore have a better bottom line. It also is more saleable because traffic that you don’t have to buy is worth money in the bank to a prospective website buyer.

The next category would be search engine traffic vs. non-search engine.

Imagine a site that gets traffic from 3 different search engines. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the traffic is divided evenly among all three. What happens if one of those three decides to reduce the rankings of the pages on that site? Catastrophy, right? One-third of your traffic is gone in a flash.

Imagine instead, a site that gets traffic from 2,000 different sources. While taking a hit from Google or another search engine will hurt, diversifying your traffic sources will take some of the sting out of it. The ironic thing about this, is that the more you reduce your dependence on Google by diversifying your traffic sources, the more traffic Google will send you.

The next category is type of site. This would be directories vs. blogs vs. content sites, or niche-related vs. more general, and so on. These can be broken into many sub-categories, but basically the idea is to go out and get more website traffic from different types of sites. That way, if say, directories or blogs take a hit with respect to search engine (this happened to both of these types of sites in Google in the past), you won’t take as a big a hit to your traffic.

 

The Bottom Line? Increase the number of keywords your site is found for in the engines, and increase the number and type of sites your site gets traffic from, and you’ll have a far more stable business. There are questions that you can ask that will help you to determine how best to proceed when confronted with a choice. When confronted with two or more choices about where to spend time on your website promotion efforts, the first question to ask is, which one of these methods will increase my diversification the most?

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3 Responses to “More Website Traffic Through Diversification”

  1. Traffic For Adsense on December 13th, 2008 12:04 am

    I do get your point about diversification of keywords

    But there is a limit to how many keyywords you can optimize one website for

    The limiting factor is obviously the size of the site

    if you have a 50 page website then really you can only effectively optimize for about 200 keywords

    Any more and the risk is diluting the content too much

  2. Kurt Schmitt on December 13th, 2008 1:17 pm

    @Traffic for Adsense

    I partially agree. I wasn’t suggesting, though, that you optimize for 10,000 keywords. I was suggesting that you use the number of keywords your site is found for as an indicator of the stability of the site. The more keywords for which the site is found, the more stable the traffic.

    So, if your site is not doing as well as it should, look at expanding the content and links so that the site is found for more keywords. The long tail is where most of your traffic comes from, and you don’t need to optimize for it. It just happens. There are things you can do, however, to help things along.

    I have a 70 page site that got traffic from almost 1300 keywords last month. I only optimize for maybe 80 of them, so the other 1200 just come along for the ride. That 1200, however, is no where near the kind of keyword diversity I need in order to get lots of stable, long term traffic.

    Underlying my point, though, is the idea that perhaps a 50 page (or 70 page, in my case) site, at least in any niche with any competition, is possibly too small to compete.

    It may be too small to get stable traffic at all. Obviously every niche and every site is different, but it’s sometimes hard to carve out a small sub-niche since the larger sites will often just naturally rank for the words you’re trying to hit. Certainly this is the case with my 70 page site. It simply needs more pages and links.

    I have another site that has about 400 pages, and last month, it was found for over 15,000 keywords. I only (on page) optimize for one keyword per page. So, as far as on page optimization, I’m working with maybe 400 or so keywords. The rest is just happening on its own, or due off page optimization, such as links, secondary keywords, or site structure.

    In addition, as I just hinted, there is more than one type of optimization. Ideally, you should be focusing your on page optimization efforts on one primary keyword per page, and then sprinkling in many related keywords. To some degree, this just happens out of natural writing. As that page begins to do well for that one keyword, it will bring the others along for the ride.

    For off page criteria, though, you can select a number of keywords per page, and use both internal and external linking with appropriate anchor text to boost your ranking for a number of secondary keywords for each page.

    I have one page that is found for over 1400 keywords each month. It’s usually number one on Google for its chosen keyword. It’s also usually number one for a number of other high traffic keywords. I’ve used on page wording plus linking, plus creating related pages to make that happen. The other 1395 or so keywords all add up to many thousands of page views per month for that page, but I did not optimize for them.

    Thanks for stopping by,

    -Kurt

  3. Traffic For Adsense on December 13th, 2008 6:44 pm

    Sorry I misunderstood on the 10000 keywords thing

    And you made a really important point about the keywords one optimizes for vs the keywords that the site DOES rank for

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