Sometimes you got to be lucky to get a lot of search engine traffic, but more often you can heavily influence how much traffic you get from Google and the other search engines. I noticed a 10% increase in traffic on one of my websites pushing the daily number of visitors through the 1,100 barrier 7 days in a row already (knock on wood). I checked my stats to see if there is a clue where the traffic is coming from, but there is no clear indicator. However, I reviewed the keywords I am ranking for and noticed that the second part of my main website title is actually ranking very well in Google. “Well” as in being in the #1 spot on Google and what is even better – no Adwords on top of it. There are 5 Adwords on the right side of the search results, but that is it. A quick keyword check with the Wordtracker/Overture tool shows an estimated 267 searches per day and apparently I getting the majority of these visitors to my website. The second main keyword I am ranking for is a misspelled version of an extremely competitive keyword. I am ranking #2 for that keyword and again there are several hundred searches a day. The third major keyword (or better: phrase) my specific website is ranking for is the first part of my main website title.

So, looking at this data it shows that my entire website title is made out of two highly searched keyword phrases and combined helps my website to get over 1,100 visitors per day. Of course there is much more involved that makes the website rank well, but it shows how important a good choice of keywords in your website title is. In my case I know I only used the first half of my website title in SEO related link building pieces. The incoming link juice just helps my website to rank well for both parts of my website title. So, my recommendation is that you carefully research keywords and phrases for your website title. It also helps to combine it with a domain name if you can for new projects.

For the last few months I have not really done much with that specific website in regards to updating it. But I am increasing my efforts to better monetize the existing content. This website is the one that I am using to build an email list for a newsletter, but I also want to see if I can add some affiliate marketing income to income stream coming from this website. The website makes an average of ~$10.00 per day from Google Adsense, which is nice on one side, but kinda wasted on the other side as I am sure there are higher paying products out there that I can put up for promotion on this website. Anyway – it’s nice to see that even without any active promotion traffic on an existing website can grow to new heights (thanks, Google).

Whenever I check specific markets to see if there is a niche that is worth it to me to give PPC marketing a shot, I check out the competition. In many cases I run into websites that are nothing else but PPC shelters – websites with no real content other than landing pages and surrounding “contact us”, “Privacy Policy”, and “About us” pages. These pages are usually added to gain some better Google Quality Score in Adwords. But other than there is nothing that would make it a real website. My approach to PPC marketing is a little different. Every website I build I also build with SEO in mind. I kick of my PPC campaigns, but I also do some minor SEO to get the website indexed in search engines and to eventually gain some organic traffic. Organic (free) traffic is great to have as it can provide income you don’t have to work for. Search Engine traffic is not a short-term thing really as it takes time to rank well for specific keywords. It also requires additional efforts to build the website. I usually spend some extra time to add unique content to each page to bypass some of the filters Google and other search engines have in place for duplicate content.

Several PPC gurus have also the suspicion that a website that has incoming links gets better Adwords Quality Scores assigned compared to websites or domains whose only reason of existence is the PPC traffic the owner wants to send to it. When doing PPC keep in mind that Google prefers unique and original content. Google does not like affiliate marketing as that is a huge problem when it comes to duplicate content. I am sure they will extend filtering efforts over time to shape the Internet the way they want it and not how the marketer wants it. If you are building a business for the long run your efforts should reflect this accordingly. I use WordPress to build my initial website and then add content. I can then manually join the landing pages into the mix without exposing them to the public that is trying to find out what I doing. WordPress is also good to use when it comes to SEO. It takes me about an hour to setup WordPress and to customize it for that specific website I am working on. After that it is just adding content – pretty smooth sailing if you ask me. SE-friendly links and a few other pieces are fast and easy to implement with existing plugins. Then it is just up to you how you add incoming links to a website.

Many many moons ago it was pretty efficient to have your website submitted to directory websites and traffic was scheduled to come in. This was a good deal and a great step when doing SEO for a website. Directory submissions always helped a little bit, even though traffic barely reached hundreds of visitors per day that way. I recently did a test on one of my websites and bought a 750 Directory submission package over at Digital Point. The initial traffic surge upon ordering the package was good. Many directory owners at least took a look and then accepted the website. I probably received about 70 or 80 confirmed listings which I think is pretty decent. But how much link value did I receive? Apparently not much because my stats show a pretty clear picture. 10 unique visitors just does not represent any significant traffic. I used to see more traffic on a new website a year ago. Directory submissions might help to get a website indexed, but they do not help anymore to get any significant rankings in search engines. So, for me that helps to decide to rather spend the $35.00 (or whatever it was) on other forms of SEO.

SEO has become more difficult and you have to be much more creative nowadays to drive traffic to your website. I am sure Google has already de-valued links from del.icio.us and other “top” bookmarking websites. Smaller bookmarking websites might still work for some link power, but in the long run every average SEO will use the same source to get links. The above average SEOs know better sources for sure and still find loopholes around the higher requirements. Anyone who has build up a network of folks has a significant advantage in today’s Internet traffic market.

Almost all my websites point to a domain of mine where I host a helpdesk software. This is used instead of maintaining several “contact us” forms. This is a great way to streamline your communications and makes it easy for customers as well. The helpdesk is hosted on a domain name referencing my business name and therefore works for all my websites and I do not need to customize it. I am using Intellodesk as my helpdesk software. It was up to date when I bought it, but development has stalled since then and the software has a bug. This bug allows tickets to be submitted without being registered. Of course spammers figured that out and I am getting 10+ tickets a day filled with porn SPAM. Intellodesk is encoded software and so I cannot make any changes to it. I submitted a ticket to the maker and they offered to install captcha image verification for me, but that was the last thing I heard. No response and no action from them. Since I am not ready to spend $30 on Kayako (my next choice) eSupport Software I am kinda stuck.

So, I came up with a small (inconvenient) workaround. I moved the helpdesk to a different directory and installed a new page in the root directory. From there the visitor is asked to enter a captcha security code and then continue. If the code input fails I am logging the IP addresses of the visitors and will then enter them into my .htaccess files. If they succeed entering the code they can access the helpdesk and open a ticket. I figured if somebody really wants to contact me, the will have no problems completing this initial step – even though it is inconvenient.I also updated my robots.txt file to exclude the entire site from being spidered. Since this is my helpdesk I don’t need it in Google or Yahoo. I know this is not perfect, but for the time being the best thing in my opinion.

This also gave me the opportunity to refresh some of my PHP knowledge. I used a pre-existing script for the captcha and then modded it to do the extra IP address logging. Now IP addresses are dynamically inserted into the .htaccess file and spammers are banned. I am using session based information and upon 3rd try the IP address goes into the .htaccess. The code snippet to dynamically update an .htaccess file looks like this:

<?PHP

$ip = getenv(’REMOTE_ADDR’);
$handle = fopen(”../.htaccess”, “a”);
fwrite($handle, “Deny from $ip\n”);
fclose($handle);
echo “The IP Address $ip has banned from this domain due to SPAM.”;
mail(”you@example.com”, “Banned IP”, “Deny from $i”);
?>

You can use this code for many other pieces and that makes it so interesting. Grab the referrer information for keyword or website that brought the visitor to your website and do something with it. Normal web statistic programs like AWStats do a good job, but it just does not tell you which keyword lead the visitor to which webpage of yours. You would need to do a lot of digging yourself to check search engines and rankings to gather that information. Now instead of piping that information into an email (like the example above does), dump it into a database or text file. We are going to use the HTTP_REFERRER variable for this. What is HTTP_REFERRER?

‘HTTP_REFERER’ = The address of the page (if any) which referred the user agent to the current page.

The following code snippet would display the keyword the user came of from Google in your PHP-based web page. Replace the “echo” line with what ever you want to do with the information (email, database, etc.). Register_Globals needs to be enabled on your server for this to work.

if(strpos($_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’], “google.com/search”) !== false) {
$keyword = array_pop(explode(”&q=”, $referer));
echo(htmlentities(urldecode($keyword)));
}

Have fun getting better keyword information from your website.