Site up... Now optimise for traffic flow

[weinerschizel]

I got my site up. It's a blog site with various product reviews inside the articles. I got a few articles posted now as well and want to start driving more traffic to the site.

Here's what I've tried so far...
1. Facebook (1/3 of traffic) - Wall feeds...
2. Direct (1/3 of traffic) - People I've chatted about my site with.
3. Other redirects (1/3 of traffic) - mostly from www.mzinga.com... no idea why I'm getting hits from there.
4. Search engines only 2 hits.

I stumbled onto Long Tail Keywords and have been reading a lot about them but am slightly confused. I'm definitely going to show my novice here... but sure how I register them. Are they actual phrases in the articles? Or are they registered in the code somehow? If they are phrases in the article, how do you edit your content yet maintain your tonality and personality in the article?

Aside from Long Tail Keywords what are some other cool free methods to increase traffic to the website? I hope to start using adwords shortly. There's a seminar coming up I'd like to attend with some training on them.

[MattInglot]

The keyword long tail basically refers to searches that are specific to what the searcher is looking for. As the number of websites has increased and search engines have improved, there is a growing number of people understanding that the key to finding what you want is to be specific in your search query, rather than typing a general topic.

For example, instead of searching "car dealership" you may search for "toronto car dealership" to find the dealership in Toronto. Or "honda dealerships Ontario" to find all the honda dealerships in Ontario". That's an example of a more specific query along the lines of geography and the type of car. A lot more variables can come into play. Compare a few more:

* "antiques" vs "toys from 1800s", "buy 1950s clocks", "1901 penny auction"
* "diets" or "diet help" vs "losing weight after pregnancy", "low carb dieting help", "jenny craig diet review", "does the acai berry diet work?", "what is a good dieting program for diabetics"

Generally the short-tail can be considered 2-3 words, long tail 3 or more. As you get into longer and longer search terms, you start to realize that people can be looking for what you offer in many many different ways, virtually infinite.

The big distinction here is that whole infinite possibilities part. If you add up all the ways that people find your website with long tail searches, it starts to become a pretty darn important number. But each search term in that long tail may represent only a handful of visitors.

Step one to optimizing for the long tail would be to have a lot of specific content. If your website is all about car maintenance, you would capture more long tail if you had specific maintenance guides for different makes of cars, and even more if you had different guides for different years (someone's already done this of course). That's the difference between capturing "car repair guides" and "1998 honda civic repair guide" Aside from using HTML tags properly for best SEO results (start reading http://www.seomoz.org) there aren't special "codes", it's all about having lots of specific content.

The long tail concept is key for creating successful Adwords campaigns cheap. I wrote an article on this recently at http://www.tiltedpixel.com/index.php?p=blog.ViewPost&post=12 Rule #1 is essentially explaining how to target for the long tail to get low keyword bids (because you won't be competing with as many people) while at the same time targeting people who are looking for specifically what you sell, and writing ads targeted to them. Once you "get" the concept, you can use software to help produce these campaigns, since you can end up with hundreds or even thousands of keywords, depending on the popularity of your topic.

[juggly]

informative. These are some tips to improve page rank
1. Update your site regularly
2. Link to your website from other sites
3. Give away content
4. Link to authority sites from your site
5. Write link bait
you can get the official assistance from Tucktail.com (http://www.tucktail.com/)

[liam75005]

Nice post, thanks !