I’m all about building communities, authenticity and transparency, but why are we always putting social media efforts and SEO appart? Why do people say: “I don’t care about SEO, I prefer to spend time building a community”? Both can go together.

I would never advise someone to write an article solely for search engines, but why not think about the fact that Google, Yahoo and Bing will index your content? I mean, your content is going to get indexed anyway, so having search engines in mind when you write content isn’t a bad thing for extra visibility. Having search engines in mind doesn’t mean writing keywords stuffed articles, it just means paying extra attention to basic SEO.

Then you know what? You can still build that community and benefit from some search engine traffic.

Direct Traffic

I love direct traffic because it makes me feel good! Direct traffic is someone who actually remembered your domain name and took the time to type it manually in the address bar to visit your site. If you reach my website on a consistent basis by typing the name manually in your browser, I love you.  Direct traffic is about 30% of my blog traffic which I think is huge! Let’s have a look if you guys are good traffic

If it’s green, it’s good. For people not familiar with Google Analytics, everything that’s green or red is the particular statistic compared to the site’s average. There’s no surprise here as direct traffic actually represents people willing to spend time on the site. The only bad statistics is the number of new visitors but I don’t see this as bad: you guys are coming back, that’s good!

Referring Traffic

Referring traffic doesn’t seem to be that good. Referring traffic is basically traffic coming from social networks or other blogs and a lot of that is because of comments I write on so many blogs. So, let’s have a look at how you guys can’t provide me with good traffic! Just kidding.

OK, so that sucks. I mean, the only good news is that it’s bringing me new visitors but I already knew that! When I look at the stats, these are pretty good stats to me but it’s below the website’s average! It doesn’t mean you guys should stop sending me love…!

Google Traffic

Now let’s have a look if the Google traffic loves me!

I am so impressed! The Google traffic ain’t that good on some other website I run so it really is a surprise to see how good in this niche the search traffic seems to be. Every visitor spent almost ten minutes of their precious time on my blog, visiting an average of 4 pages!

Build your personal brand

You see that referring traffic is good but not as good as direct traffic and Google traffic. What does that mean? Well, it means that we all have to continue building our brand. I don’t care if people subscribe to my feed, I much prefer to see them type my name directly in the address bar or in Google: it means people actually care! That direct traffic converts in word of mouth, because these visitors know who you are and can remember your website’s name.

As for the Google traffic I don’t know. It looks to be the killer, but it might go down in the future when the site gets a lot more traffic. I prefer to think people like what they read and decide to stick around.

Now it’s not because referring traffic isn’t the best traffic source that we have to stop commenting on blogs! You know why? Yes, that personal brand thing and the loop starts all over again. In the end, traffic is simple: it all comes down to establishing your brand out there.

Resources hungry

I talked about it, the reason I bought a reseller account is because one of my website is terribly resources hungry. Before I got on the new host, a page could easily take 4-5 seconds to load and I thought this was a pain. In fact, I’m pretty sure I lost some traffic because of that: people would just go away! The main bottleneck was the mysql performance which is SO much faster on the new host: it now only takes 1-2 seconds to load a page. To my great surprised, not only my visitors are happier, but the Google bot seems to like me a little more!

Google loves it

Let’s have a look at these two charts from Google Webmaster tools:

• Number of pages crawled per day

• Average time to download a page

The red arrow marks the point where I switched host. See how the average time spent to download a page significantly dropped AND the number of pages crawled per day significantly increased! I mean, Google spend less time downloading a single page, so it uses the same total time available to download more pages! Isn’t it great?

How does that helps your website?

This will help your website because even if Google spends the same total time on your website, it actually does a lot more during that time. Not only your new pages will get indexed faster, but your other pages will get updated more often.

Some stats?

The site went from 500 uniques a day to 1000 uniques a day in a single week, and it’s increasing a little everyday since them. That’s what I call a good result.

Do I have to go with a better host?

It all depends the type of website you run. If you run a blog with not much traffic and you don’t update very often, that probably won’t make a difference. On the opposite, if you feel your website is really slow to load, you are getting some decent traffic and you update quite often then I’d say go for it!

Be aware that a reseller hosting is something around 25$ a month, so if you’re website doesn’t make 25$ a month, don’t do the upgrade!

Chose your battles

You can’t be everywhere at the same time. Are you subscribed to all possible social network and not generating a single visitor a day from these social networks? I used to be subscribed everywhere, but the reality is that it’s impossible while living a normal life to be active in every social network. That’s why it’s important to hand pick one, two or three social networks and build something around them. You will get a lot more by getting involved a lot in a single social network that getting involved a little in 25. I tried a lot of them before finding one that I felt I could use efficiently to drive traffic. You have to remember that to get traffic from a SN, it’s important to know how to exploit every little aspect of it. With million of social network members, not all of them are driving a thousands of visitors each day to their website. Why is that? Because they don’t know how to properly use them to drive traffic.

Do your homework

Analyze how the gurus do it. By joining a social network you can spot the big names out there and learn from what they do. I personally enjoy Blog Catalog and I think it’s a great Social Network. I use it to drive traffic and it’s working very well. I learned by analyzing how the big names out there were driving traffic from it. Some prefer Twitter, Facebook, My Blog Log or whatever other social network. It’s not about what’s the best SN out there or what is your favorite SN, it’s about how you can suck everything out of it.

Share

Don’t hesitate to share you Social Network strategy and your fabourite Social Networks, we can all learn!

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. The process is relatively complex, but if you have a need to know, please read on.

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

So you see, Alexa analyze the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and that’s their main source for traffic analysis.

Why isn’t accurate?

I run a couple of websites and I obviously like to compare how they are doing against each other. They aren’t in the same niche, but i still like to have a look at the ranking in Alexa vs the traffic I get. The past few weeks confirmed what I thought: Alexa is not accurate. For example, let’s take one of my older website which actually receive 50x more visitors than SEO Horror. Yes, you read correctly, 50 times more visitors daily than SEO Horror, so it’s interesting to have look at the rankings!

here’s how seohorror.com looks in Alexa:

Wow that’s not bad for a website about a month old. We have to look at the 1 week average because the 3 months average isn’t really any good for me now as seohorror.com has only been live for a month or so. I’ve had a couple of days in the top 100 and now it looks like I’m mostly between 100,000 and 150,000 on a constant basis. I’m OK with that.

Now, let’s see how my other website with 50 times more traffic than SEO Horror compare:

What’s that? I’m ranked 556,812 this week! I mean, 50 times more traffic and I’m poorly ranked. You see how inaccurate it is!

Why does it look so inaccurate?

The reason it looks so inaccurate between my two websites is because they aren’t in the same niche. The visitors at SEO Horror are SEO/Web marketers and there are good chances you guys use the Alexa toolbar. If 50% of my readers use the Alexa Toolbar, it will certainly boost my rankings because a normal percentage could be something like 0.5% of the readers. Now, on my other blog, which is definitely not aimed at techies, nobody uses the Alexa toolbar and nobody has a single clue what this toolbar is all about. So even if I receive 50 times more traffic, because nobody use the toolbar, I get a poor ranking.

Is it any good then?

It’s good to compare with websites within your niche. For example, if I compare my blog with another SEO blog, then it makes a little more sense when I look at the numbers. If I take a look at a cooking recipe website, then it doesn’t make any sense to compare. Alexa is mainly used as a traffic estimate and to put a price on how much you’ll sell advertisement on your website. If your Alexa ranking is good, you can usually sell advertisement a little more, especially if you’re in the top 100. So, the bottom line is that it’s so much easier to get a good ranking in Alexa with a tech/SEO/internet marketing blog!

So, you can continue to use Alexa to check your website progression, but it’s definitely not everything as you just saw. 50 times more traffic does not mean 50 times better ranking….In fact it can be the complete opposite as you just saw!

Think outside articles

If you can’t initially drive thousands of visitors with your posts, you have to think about an alternative way of doing it. Even if you have thousands of visitors, it’s always interesting to increase your traffic and alternatives to articles are still of interest for you.

I know you’re asking “what alternatives can we use?”. Well, there’s nothing specific I can say here but there are a couple of concepts you can learn from. Being a developper, I always think of tools/plugins I could develop to help the community. This can be a WP plugin, a Google gadget or whatever web-based tool. How can you drive traffic with that? Well, if you host the tool on the same domain as your website, people will visit your website and subscribe to it if they like what you do. Many bloggers are doing it and it’s usually working great.

How is that different from an article? Well, it’s really unique and it’s something people can’t copy so they have to link to you. Let’s say you develop a great WordPress plugin, other bloggers will surely talk about it, use it and link to your website to actually download the plugin because it’s not available elsewhere.

One example I can give is a Google gadget I developed for one of my website. The website isn’t a blog, but the concept remains the same: not rely on Google ranking to get traffic. I’m a big fan of the well known Rubik’s Cube, so a couple of months ago I built an online Rubik’s cube timer with statistics so that people could record their best times. I had to find a way to be really different and not only rely on Google search to get some traffic, so I built a Google gadget people could put on their Google home page. I had to do this because at first, I wasn’t ranked very well for the keyword “Rubik’s Cube Timer” (Now I’m #2). While very useful, the gadget is a simple version of the timer and it’s lacking a lot of features so people still have to visit the website. The gadget is on Google directory, has a user base of 380+ users, help me drive additional traffic and is a free advertisement for my website on Google!

The gadget looks like that:

And see how it’s giving me free exposure on Google:

People searching for a timer or something similar for their Google home page ended up using my little timer. Whenever they needed additional features, they ended up on the main website. This was a great way at first to drive some important visitors and get people to talk about the website.

I’m not a developer

Ok, this was just an example to show you how can something you usually wouldn’t think about could drive traffic to your website. I’m a developer so that kind of tools is quite easy to do for me, but not everybody is a developer. There are a lot of other ways to drive traffic and backlinks to your website. Contests are particularly popular among bloggers. Having a contest on your blog will help you drive additional traffic and there are good chances other bloggers will talk about your contest if it’s any good. I’ve seen some contests like 25$ by Paypal for the top commentator of the month and stuff like that. Why not have t-shirts with your website logo and give that away once a week/month? Things like that work and you really just have to be creative.

I’m working on a couple of things outside articles only for SEO Horror and these should be live in the next couple of months. It’s OK if it takes time to develop or to get online because you’re not in short term blogging…Are you?

Be creative

I’ve said it a couple of times in this article: be creative. There aren’t any exact techniques but it’s just important to think about what else outside your articles you can use to drive traffic. One of the most successful blogger John Chow isn’t even ranked in Google for “John Chow” because of aggressive SEO techniques. How does he drives traffic then? Well, he has found numerous ways over the years to do so and he still has one of the most successful blog on the Internet with 27,000+ subscribers, whithout Google. You want to drive traffic from Google, but it’s just to show that Google isn’t everything, you can use alternative ways.

So let say you have a 100 posts blog and one post is briging you 75% of your traffic which is 750 visitors per day. So you have 99 posts getting only 25% of your traffic, how weird is that? It’s a very common situation among bloggers because each blog seems to have a “master” post. unfortunately, we tend to concentrate too much on that master post and forget about the older ones. Well, that’s a good way of loosing money.

Here’s what you can do:

1. On one of your “master” post, put a little something like: “If you liked this article, you might also like ‘x article’. So, you take most of your traffic and redirect that traffic on a similar post. This way, some people will consult two pages of your site, you double your advertisers exposure and you also double your chances of getting a new reader.
2. Write your own personal TOP 5,10,20,25, etc. It’s not because some articles are not popular that they are not good enough. Redirect your readers to great articles they don’t know about. Maybe one of that reader is a blogger who will talk about one of your newly discovered post on his blog.
3. Put a “most popular” or “personal top 5″ in one of your sidebar. People like to read the best content of a website or what’s really popular.

There are hundreds of other tricks you can use to resurect your old posts, just be creative! The important thing is not to forget about them.