Articles on Getting Free Traffic to your Site

This post is part of a series on how to promote your website for free. Here are the links to the other articles in the series: Promote your site for free: on-site SEO Promote your site for free: off-site SEO Promote your site for free: social media marketing Last time, when I covered off-site SEO… Read more

This post is part of a series on how to promote your website for free. Here are the links to the other articles in the series: Promote your site for free: on-site SEO for WordPress-based sitesPromote your site for free: forum marketingPromote your site for free: social media marketing In the first of the series… Read more

This post is part of a series on how to promote your website for free. Here are the links to the other articles in the series: Promote your site for free: off-site SEOPromote your site for free: forum marketingPromote your site for free: social media marketing This, the first in the series, addresses on-site Search… Read more

I see an awful lot of bad advice in some of the forums I visit – advice that, at best, will deliver no benefit and at worst may be harmful. One such is on the question of keyword density, and the advice I see so often is to have a density of anywhere between 2%… Read more

I saw a question today asking how to syndicate blog posts most effectively, so here’s how I do it: Very simply, I set up a TwitterFeed account a while ago. This takes the RSS feed from my site. Within my TwitterFeed account I set up services to Facebook and Twitter (both require verification). TwitterFeed takes… Read more

Bear with me while I set the background… A little over a year ago I wrote an article setting out how to install and manage widgets on WordPress. Two weeks later, WordPress released version 2.8 which completely invalidated my article because they changed the way widgets were managed. So I wrote an article on widgets… Read more

I have an interesting problem that I’ve wrestled with for a while: 99% of my search engine traffic on this site comes from Google. While I’m delighted that Google sends me a lot of traffic, there are two problems: I’m missing out on the 40% or so of web search traffic that Yahoo accounts for… Read more

A while ago I wrote about hitting Google page 1 out of 192,000,000 results for the search term ‘online home business tips’. Having hit that target I confidently waited for my traffic to start kicking up. But it remained pretty much unchanged. Digging a bit further revealed that although there were around 200,000,000 results for… Read more

I’m just completing an SEO review on the website of a local business, and I thought it may be helpful to talk generally about some of the major points that came out. Don’t fret – total confidentiality is guaranteed! First thing to keep in mind: Search Engine Optimisation is a dynamic environment. The search engines… Read more

A friend of mine talked to me the other day about getting more traffic to his site: how to do it quickly and for free. Unfortunately, quick traffic doesn’t generally come free – you need to pay for that, usually via PPC. But here are 4 ways you can build up a healthy level of… Read more

Interesting thread in the Third Tribe forum today: don’t ignore the SEO. It was started by someone who’d taken the ‘write for people, don’t write for the search engines’ mantra literally – and not done any SEO work on their site. Now, I’ve repeated the ‘write for people …’ theme many times on this site… Read more

Time for another update on my content marketing experiment. (Here’s the last update). Remember what the experiment’s about: I set up a travel website on 1st February, for the purpose of earning affiliate income through promoting tours to Asia. It’s built with WordPress and configured to look like a static website. The objective is to… Read more

A couple of weeks ago I told you about my content marketing experiment and, although it’s extremely early days yet, I thought a quick update would be good. Remember, the experiment was to see whether I could start earning affiliate commissions off a travel site on which I did no paid promotions of any kind… Read more

Last week I mentioned that I’d been building a new travel site. It’s up now, and it’s an experiment with Content Marketing. So here’s my thought process behind the site and the way I’ve set it up. Going forward, I’ll update you on the progress of the site as it grows and (hopefully!) starts to… Read more

Another question I saw recently: how do I build incoming links to my site? So why are incoming links important? Because they are the search engines’ way of assessing how good your site is. And if they think your site is good they’ll send you lots of visitors. The logic goes that if lots of… Read more

How can I SEO my WordPress blog? How can I make it easy to find on-line? Those are questions I see quite often in the forums. The fact is, your WordPress blog is already pretty search engine friendly. If you don’t believe me take it from Matt Cutts, head of anti-spam at Google – here’s… Read more

Matt Cutts is head of the Anti-Spam Team at Google – so he knows a thing or two about how to do well in the Google natural search results. In this video he talks about WordPress (and why he uses it), how to set it up, things to do and things to avoid if you… Read more

I’ve just read Brian Clark’s latest freebie, Authority Rules. Releasing a publication as good as this for free is, itself, a master-class in marketing on-line. Seth Godin talks about doing things that are remarkable in order to create authority and get people to notice you. Authority Rules expands the boundaries of remarkable. By a long… Read more

I read a post today from someone who’s experienced the frustration of focusing on the Search Engines for their website traffic. The problem is – the search engines keep changing their algorithms in order to improve the relevance of their results and to block loopholes the black-hatters find.  And this can really blow your search… Read more

I saw this question today in one of the forums:  how to market a new business without spending thousands. If it’s just money you’re talking about then there are quite a few ways, but none of them are truly free.  You will always have to invest time and effort. I’m going to restrict this to… Read more

I just saw an interesting question in a forum: how does a blog help with SEO?  Here’s the answer I offered: An active (and that’s important) blog is attractive to a search engine for three primary reasons: It’s updated with new information regularly Through the mechanism of tags and categories (or labels on blogger), its… Read more

A few days ago I covered some basic on-page SEO techniques. So, as promised at the end of that article, here’s the second part of the answer to the question about whether SEO or good content is better for generating good search engine visibility: content and its impact on off-page SEO. Off-page SEO is more… Read more

Which is better for making your site visible to the search engines – SEO or Good Content?  This summarises a question I saw the other day, and here’s the basis of my response: For the best search engine visibility you need a combination of both – good, current content and a well-optimised site. In this… Read more

Q: With all the big, easy-to-use, function-rich, free blogging services that are available why should you go to the trouble of hosting your own blog..? A: Better SEO, total control, more traffic and more sales – although those reasons won’t apply if you’re not blogging for business! When I started out blogging I opened a… Read more