Website Traffic Building

4 Proven Online Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business


Building it is not enough - if you want business to arrive, you'll need some proven online marketing strategies to drive it. Here are four to start Read more

4 Simple Ways to Increase Leads On Your WordPress Website


If you want to increase leads on your WordPress website, there's some work involved, but it will repay you with increased rankings on Google, which means increased visits and revenues Read more

Shared Hosting and IP-Based Spam Lists


Shared hosting is inexpensive for small companies starting out on the web, but it has its risks and downsides. Getting blacklisted can be very bad for Read more

A Friday Story, and Blocking Spam


Have you heard the Friday Story? It's about what happens when you consistently give something for free - and every business owner needs to think about it. We talk about blocking spam Read more

Article Keyword Research - Going Where The Traffic Is


Do your Article Keyword Research before you start writing blog posts, and your website traffic will improve fast. It's fast, easy, and it pays Read more

WordPress - Disable Comments


If you find yourself frustrated by spam and searching for wordpress disable comments or turn off comments wordpress, we're happy to help. The Quick Answer To How To Disable Comments In WordPress Log in and go to Settings, Discussion. Uncheck "Allow people Read more

4 Simple Ways to Increase Leads On Your WordPress Website

Posted on by Karilee in Website Traffic Building Leave a comment

Increase Leads On Your WordPress Website

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Are you using search engine optimization (SEO) as part of your lead generation efforts?

When done right, SEO can attract highly qualified leads to your WordPress site in the form of organic traffic.

In fact, SEO increases your search engine rankings for the keywords you want to target, gives people a chance to click on your site, and offers you a chance to show them why your website is worth their while.

And, if you’ve optimized your site for SEO properly, the traffic that comes to your website from search results will be a part of your target audience and convert, just the way you want them to.

The problem is, despite knowing all of this about SEO, many people find the thought of optimizing their websites for higher rankings overwhelming.

If you know that you need to improve your SEO efforts, but don’t know where to start, keep reading to learn about some simple SEO strategies to increase leads on your WordPress site.

1. Create a Sitemap

Sitemaps are the files that list your site’s web pages for Google and other popular search engines.

This way they know what kind of content you have on your website and how it’s organized. This ensures your site is crawled and indexed for the right audience.

Google itself has said that creating a sitemap is good for higher search rankings and says you should always create a sitemap if:

  • Your site is large so nothing fails to get indexed and served up in search results
  • There’s not a lot of internal linking on your site, which makes it harder for bots to crawl and index your content
  • If your website is new and doesn’t have inbound links from other websites, which helps lead crawlers to your website for indexing

 

You can easily create a sitemap for your WordPress site using the following plugins:

 

If you don’t want to add another plugin to your site, and are using one of the most popular SEO plugins on the market today, Yoast SEO, you can create a sitemap with that instead.

To start, navigate to SEO > General > Features, scroll down to XML sitemaps, and turn the feature On. Yoast SEO will then create a sitemap of your entire website for you.

Creating a sitemap with Yoast SEO

You can also click on the question mark to reveal a link for seeing your website’s sitemap:

How to Generate an XML Sitemap

When you click on See the XML sitemap, you’ll see all the sitemaps that have been created for your site. For instance, there might be one for posts, pages, categories, and more.

Click on each to see more details.

Example of an XML SItemap from Yoast which helps SEO

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When you create a sitemap for your WordPress site, most search engines are able to detect it, crawl it, and index it.

But for good measure, you should also “tell” Google you’ve created a sitemap so crawlers can index your site faster.

For step by step instructions on how to do this, check out this helpful tutorial by Yoast.

2. Conduct Keyword Research

It doesn’t matter how great your content is, if you don’t include the right keywords, you’ll never be found in search results by your target audience.

After all, the keywords in your content are used by search engines like Google to deliver the right content to the right people depending on their search queries.

For example, let’s say you wrote an extensive review about the movie Titanic, but didn’t include keywords like “Titanic movie,” “Titanic with Leonardo DiCaprio,”, or “Titanic soundtrack.”

When someone comes to Google looking for historical facts about the sinking of the Titanic, and your content mysteriously pops up, one of two things might happen:

  1. You’ll fail to generate any leads on your website because people will see your content snippet and realize you don’t have the kind of content they are looking for.
  2. People will click on your website thinking you’ll have facts about the Titanic, only to find out you reviewed the movie, which is not what they’re looking for. As a result, they’ll immediately abandon your site, increase your bounce rate, and harm your site’s SEO (since Google favors low bounce rates and web pages that have lots of user engagement).

How to Find Good Keywords

To find good keywords to use in your content so your content ends up in search results for people that will want to visit your site and convert try using SEMRush.

All you have to do is enter the keyword you’re wanting to rank for in the search box and see what keywords are ranking high right now in Google.

For example, when we enter the term “WordPress website,” this is what shows:

Keyword search for WordPress Website

Not only will you see what the most popular keywords related to “WordPress website” are, you’ll see related keywords as well.

You’ll also notice the search volume, the cost per click (CPC) of each term (which is helpful if you run PPC ads), and a link to the actual search engine results that have that keyword.

These are the terms you want to use in your content, along with their variations, to boost your site’s SEO and generate qualified leads.

3. Use Keywords in the Right Places

Once you’ve found the keywords you want to use on your website, you’ll need to optimize the actual content that surrounds them.

The key here is to use one main keyword per piece of content.

You don’t want to use the same keyword for multiple pieces of content because they’ll compete against each other in SERPs, which is not helpful.

To find out which content that has already been published that needs SEO optimization, again use SEMRush. Navigate to Organic Research > Positions and enter your domain name.

Competitive Keyword Research To Rank In Organic Search

You’ll immediately see the keywords your content is ranking for, their position in Google search results, and the URL each keyword corresponds to on your website.

How to See Keywords Your Content Is Ranking For

Focus on content that is ranking between 4 and 10. These are the pieces that are already on the first page of Google, but could use a little help.

If you don’t have any content that is ranking that high, take a look at what content you feel is the most important to your brand and concentrate on optimizing it for higher rankings.

To help improve your content rank higher in search results, and get people that are actually interested in what you have to offer, aim to put keywords in the following places:

  • Page title
  • Meta descriptions
  • Subheadings
  • Content
  • Images
  • URLs
  • Links

 

The goal is to place keywords throughout your content so crawlers can index your site properly for search results and people reading your content can determine whether your content is relevant to them or not.

To help you out, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to show you when your content is optimized using your designated content, and where you need to make improvements.

Optimizing for Google Search With the Yoast SEO Plugin

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Optimizing your content after you’ve chosen your target keywords is ultimately what will bring traffic to your site.

And, if you’ve optimized your content the right way, and are using keywords that are right for your target audience, you’ll see that the traffic coming to your site is full of leads that want to (and will) convert.

4. Optimize Your Images

Making your images SEO friendly is another helpful way to drive lots of leads to your WordPress site from search results.

Not to mention, using images on your website breaks up written text, grabs people’s attention and engages them, and ultimately helps your search rankings thanks to the increase in session duration.

But what many people don’t realize is that not optimizing their images can actually hurt their SEO efforts in two major ways:

  1. Images that aren’t optimized tend to load slower and negatively affect your search rankings
  2. Images without keywords in the Alt Title won’t appear in the right search results

You can easily compress your WordPress images using an online like TinyPNG or a WordPress plugin like Smush It so images take up less server space and load faster.

Compressing Images for your WordPress Site with WP Smush

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This will ensure a better viewing experience and encourage people to stick around, become interested in what you have to offer (thus becoming a lead) and convert by subscribing or making a purchase.

If you really want to improve the speed and performance of your website for site visitors, you should use a CDN to deliver content and images in the quickest way possible for all site visitors.

When it comes to your image descriptions, the part you never want to leave out is the Alt Title.

 

Crawlers index this part so they can place your images, and your content, in relevant search results.

Think about it. Sometimes people only search for images.

Adding the Alt Title to an Image in WordPress

You want to make sure your images show up for your target audience, since they’re most likely to become leads and convert in the ways you want them to.

In the end, people are visual by nature and expect to see images mixed in with your site’s content.

 

Don’t let images harm your chances of driving qualified leads from search results to your website.

Conclusion

And there you have it! Some of the simplest SEO strategies you can use on your WordPress website starting right now to bring more traffic and leads to your website.

When it comes to building a larger following or generating more online sales, you depend on the type of leads that come to your website.

Don’t let lead opportunities pass you by because you don’t know how to optimize your site for SEO.

Instead, make sure the right people see the right content at the right time in search results so that everyone that visits your site can be turned into a loyal follower or customer.


Shared Hosting and IP-Based Spam Lists

Posted on by kievve in Website Traffic Building 4 Comments

Inexpensive shared hosting is wonderful when you’re starting out, if you find the right hosting company. Unfortunately, it also increases your risk of having your site show up on a ban list for malware, even if that malware isn’t actually on your site.

Having visitors warned that your site may host malicious software is NOT a good way to get more traffic…

Why Shared Hosting Increases The Chance Of Your Website Being Blacklisted

Here’s what happens. When you buy shared hosting, your website files are on a portion of a server that is also shared with many other websites. If those other websites aren’t diligent about website maintenance or updates, or use poor security hygiene such as weak passwords, they can get infected with malware AND you can be associated by proximity. This becomes worse if your shared hosting company crams too many

How To Find Your Website’s IP Address

Your website is associated with an IP address. If you don’t know what that address is, you can use a free web tool to find out. Just go to https://www.ultratools.com/tools/ipWhoisLookup and enter your domain name, and the IP address associated with your domain name comes up.

Unfortunately, with shared hosting, that same IP address can be associated with many other sites. Just one or two sloppily maintained or insecure websites can put you in a “bad neighborhood” when it comes to getting blacklisted for malware or spam.

How To Find Out If Your Website Is Blacklisted

Today I used the new GravityScan tool to check on some of my sites. Sure enough, one of my oldest sites (not this one!) was showing that it had been blacklisted by three sites.

Shared Hosting Blacklist Examples

While one was a false positive, and no longer showed my site as a problem, the other two weren’t so happy. It is possible to get warnings that aren’t serious… the free GravityScan tool is provided by a company that sells malware removal, after all. However, it’s a really useful scan, and tells you what to do next when you get a spam warning that your website has been blacklisted:

Spam Warning

You don’t want to necessarily call and give them money yet. See the click “here” link? Go to the site that is reporting the issue and check both your domain name and IP address there. Putting in your site name isn’t enough – you need to check whether EITHER the name (such as outcomemarketing.com) or the IP associated with that name are blacklisted. I mentioned above how to find your website’s IP address.

When I looked at my site’s IP on http://www.abuseat.org, I got details about the problem, and clear instructions that it was beyond my power to fix. I needed to call the hosting company to get them to clean up the offending neighbor site. I’ve obscured the offending site, but here’s the relevant part of the very detailed report I received:

“If you do not recognize the hostname www.xxxxxxx-xxxx.com as belonging to you, it means that some other account on this shared hosting site has been compromised, and there is NOTHING you (or we) can do to fix the infection. Only the administrator of this machine or the owner of www.xxxxxxx-xxxx.com can fix it.”

What To Do If You Are Blacklisted Because Of Shared Hosting

I called my hosting company, and they were surprised that I could give them the exact name of the offending site on my shared hosting, but promised to clear up the issue within 24 hours.

I also ran a check of my WordPress site with the free WordFence malware scan to make sure I hadn’t picked up anything contagious from my unsavoury neighbor. Unfortunately, shared hosting puts you at a bit more risk of catching malware. It’s important to be vigilant about website updates such as WordPress versions, themes and plugins when on shared hosting.

Why Is My Website Traffic Down?

Then I remember that one of my clients had mentioned that her traffic was down, rather inexplicably. She thought it was a new plugin she’d added, but I didn’t think so, so I did a GravityScan run on her site. Sure enough… She’s on the same three blacklists. Although she’s on a different server, she’s on the same shared hosting company, so I wasn’t really surprised.

Upgrading Web Hosting

Since her business is growing quickly, I think it’s time for her to get on a semi-dedicated server or managed WordPress plan. It’s a little more expensive, but when the loss of a single client can cost you hundreds of dollars, it pays for itself quickly. Shared hosting can be okay in some cases for a new business just starting out, but when the revenues start to roll in, it’s time to upgrade.

Be aware that managed WordPress can limit your options in terms of the plugins and even themes you use, and is generally for one site only. However, everything is normally kept up to date for you, which can save you on maintenance costs. If you’re looking to host more than one site, semi-shared hosting could be a better choice for you. There’s still a small risk of a “bad neighbor”, but because these plans cost a little more, they tend to attract more professional businesses who take site updates seriously.

Website speed is also a huge factor in getting traffic and conversions – and inexpensive entry-level shared hosting can be pretty slow. No amount of speed-tuning a website makes up for a server that takes too long to respond at all.

My client needs to find a hosting company that is diligent about PHP updates (the one we’re on is notorious for running out-of-date software on their servers). GravityScan also told me that the hosting company we’re using is running PHP 5.4.19 software that has 77 known vulnerabilities… and is not even supported any more. WordPress offically recommends you use a web host that provides PHP 7 or higher. HTTPS support is also recommended, but how to specifically choose a hosting company is a topic for another day.


Article Keyword Research – Going Where The Traffic Is

Posted on by Karilee in Website Traffic Building 8 Comments

Recently I was doing article keyword research and I spotted an almost perfect long tail keyword in my niche. It’s related to an annoying problem everyone who runs a WordPress website or does web design encounters – comment spam.

What caught my eye was 1900 searches per month in the US, and 5400 globally. And, importantly, zero competition. Yep, not one article out there actually focused on this keyword phrase.

Article Keyword Research

You see, I’d just been looking at my Google Analytics, figuring out where traffic was coming from. I was focusing particularly on keywords, and the lesson was clear that people are looking for what they want, not what I think they want! Some of my greatest sources of traffic were obscure (but relevant) keywords with little or no competition.

The Easiest Way to Improve Your Website Traffic For Free

In short, as I was reminded of a very fundamental rule of web development: Do your article keyword research before you chose what to write about!

I Began With A Wildcard Topic Search

The first step in article keyword research is to come up with an idea to test. As I mentioned in How to Get Unlimited Article Ideas, I really like the Keyword Researcher tool. If you want to try it out, be sure to use Google Chrome, as it doesn’t run in other browsers.

I searched for How to * in wordpress. The asterisk is a wildcard, and the tool substitutes for the wildcard to create a list of long tail keyword phrases that have been searched for. I had about 145 results. Since Keyword Researcher doesn’t give me traffic numbers, it was time to move to another tool.

Then I Checked Traffic and Competition

Article Keyword Research Pays OffStep two in my article keyword research was to check these keywords for traffic and competition in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. By the way, you can only check up to 100 phrases at a time, unless you create an Adwords account and log in.

I noticed that there were a bunch of related long tail keywords, and they had some of the best numbers… although they were still very low, ranging from 16 to 360 local searches per month. Obviously there was demand for information on this topic, and the competition numbers were low.

  • how to disable comments in wordpress
  • how to delete all comments in wordpress
  • how to get rid of comment box in wordpress
  • how to hide comments in wordpress
  • how to disable comments on a page in wordpress
  • how to block comments in wordpress

 

However, when I looked beyond my Search Terms and into the Keyword Ideas adwords generated, I noticed the “wordpress disable comments” phrase you can see in the image above. Now those traffic numbers are excellent, with no competition! I decided to use some of the other related keyword phrases in the article, as well.

Finally, I Wrote my Article

Of course I used proper SEO copywriting techniques to ensure that my writing effort won’t be wasted. A few weeks after I publish it, I can be confident of regular traffic. In fact, if I rank #1 for the keyword phrase, which I expect to, I should get about 42% of the traffic… that’s an extra 798 US visitors per month (2268 globally), that I can assist, and who will learn that I’m accurate, helpful, and knowledgeable about WordPress.

I”m not suggesting that you’ll want to do article keyword research for everything you write, but if even half your blog posts and articles were created this way, many more people would benefit from your writing. And, of course, if the articles are on your website, you’ll see improved traffic.

What’s A Blog Post or Article Worth?

Is Article Keyword Research Really Worth $2400 Per Post?

Well, if you write useful, timeless content that appeals to your target audience, it can be worth quite a bit over the lifetime of your business website. Steve Pavlina wrote an article back in 2006, estimating the lifetime value of each article he writes on his personal growth website at $2400. Does that help you feel a bit more motivated about article keyword research?


How to Get Unlimited Article Ideas

Posted on by Karilee in Website Traffic Building 3 Comments

If you’ve ever struggled when planning what to write about on your website, here’s how to generate unlimited article ideas.

Every savvy business today knows that producing relevant, original content for their website or blog helps bring in more traffic – and if you’ve done your job right, more traffic means more leads, which means more business and Income. Today, we’re going to rediscover some traditional ways to get article ideas, and, if you read to the end, one almost-magic technique for getting a relevant list of article ideas just right for your prospective readers.

Where Do You Get Article Ideas?

It actually surprises me that folks get caught on this one, but I’ve realized that getting article ideas is a real challenge for many businesses. There’s no shortage of conventional article ideas tips out there, and many of them are good sources of article writing ideas. You may have seen all these before, but keep reading for more powerful methods, including the almost-magical “article idea generator” we all hope to find. Read more


A Gift For You On My Father’s Birthday

Posted on by Karilee in Website Traffic Building 9 Comments

Today is my father’s birthday, and it seemed like a good idea to give a present in his honor – a gift for you!

You see, indirectly, my father got me started in this whole computer-geek thing. How many people do you know who used to crawl around as babies in a mainframe computer room? In the early sixties, he’d occasionally take me in to “the office” with him, or my mother would stop by with me for a visit. He managed a major mainframe data center. Read more