If you are in it for the money-E-Commerce gathering leads or advertising your offline store your sites life-blood is Qualified Traffic. Lets start with Qualified. To me Qualified for Pepsi may mean all current drinkers of that venerable drink as well as all Coca Cola drinkers. Thats pretty much anyone I have ever met. In fact even if you only drink milk Pepsi brand building may yet convert you from a lactarian to a Pepsierian. Incidentally my site is likely to rank high on the term Pepsierian given I seem to be the first person to use that term. Pity no one ever searches for this term. More to the point if they were to search I wouldnt be able to sell them anything or convert them since I would have no clue what a person searching for this term is actually looking for. Well you get the idea. So for sites like Pepsi where the target is everyone and their grandparents one measure for traffic is Daily Reach. In the case of Pepsi it is about 150 people per million according to Alexa .Its also the 13000th most visited site in the world. By way of comparison Coca Cola is the 9000th most visited site with just about 200 people per million. Google is 3rd with a daily reach approaching 300000 per million. Say one in 3 users of internet uses Google at least once daily. Not bad! At this point we will ignore how easy it is to manipulate Alexa rankings and why a certain type of site ranks higher. The point is all the rankings have to be taken with a grain of salt. More on that in a future article when we discuss phenomena like Google Bomb. We will also discuss the motivation behind cheating. Of course statistics like Reach Per Million are awfully depressing if your site is about the problems faced by Inuit community in Congo. That community (as far as I know) is so small that even if your site was an Authority on that subject you wouldnt get very far. The Inuit Community in Congo example is pretty contrived. So how about a real site? What are the steps that we need to take to build some real traffic? Broadly speaking we get traffic from the following sources: 1> Search Engines: The search engine displays your site as the most relevant for the search term. This can be a result of your site ranking high on the search engine due to its ranking relevance and popularity bringing Organic visitors to your site. It could also be because the site owner pays the search engine usually on a per click basis. 2>Affiliates: These are other websites that act as a front for you or which display your advertisements or the latest fad of Pre sales pages. These can be banner or textual advertisements. The affiliates websites usually expect a percent of sales(Pay per action) or charge a fixed amount per month. They direct their traffic your way and are compensated through a pre-arranged agreement. Some of the affiliate sites have lots of context sensitive contents. For example this affiliate tickets selling site http://www.ticketnest.com is chock full of information about various bands and theatrical events. 3> Email Advertising: This works well in some cases. However this channel is often abused by spammers and is beyond the scope of this article. 4> Offline Advertising: This includes newspapers TV radio magazine advertisements exhorting people to visit you. 5> Offline brand: We didnt hear about Pepsi from their website. Its hard to imagine but there was a time when we were drinking that stuff but had never heard of the world wide web. Too bad my 11 month old son would never be able to say the same. The offline brand of WalMart may convince users to visit their website. Lets focus on the Organic visitors (users that visit the site via Search Engine Optimization or SEO Efforts) . Its easy to segment these visitors in the same class as Offline brand visitors since there is no cost associated with them. No affiliates to share profits with and no search engines to pay per click. There is also no Click Fraud or Affiliate Fraud to worry about. Also many people tend to trust Organic results more than PPC results. So what is the single most important factor in getting people to visit your site? To answer that question lets turn to some interesting statistics. It so turns out that 69% of people dont navigate beyond the top five sites returned by a search engine. More importantly 91% of the visitors dont look beyond the top twenty sites. In other words if you dont rank in the top 5 of the keyword of your choice it is likely that you are left to pick from just 31% of the traffic. And if you dont rank in the top 20 you are just viewed by the pickiest 9%. To convince these people to buy you best have a very good product price or value. The old real estate adage of location location location is just as true in the WWW virtual real estate. In other words the easiest sales are made if you rank in the top five. Sadly this is not a secret and therefore ranking in the top 5 is exceedingly difficult for competitive keywords. Ranking the site high for some keywords has given rise to a new profession: SEO or Search Engine Optimization. These professionals called as Search Engine Optimizers sometimes treated with deference given to demi-gods and witch doctors. While other times when they cant produce the results they are treated like charlatans quacks snake oil salemen-with contempt. The job of an SEO company is to focus on what key phrases will get you the most qualified traffic write web copy(on page optimization) using those search terms(or keywords) design the navigation of the site (site navigation optimization) as well as convince complementary sites to link to the site in question. The expected outcome of all this running around is to convince the search engines that your site and more to the point your landing page is the most appropriate one for certain keywords. What are the possible problems with hiring an SEO? Cost: It is quite a bit of work and that unfortunately gets pricey. The formula really is quite simple: how much is the qualified traffic worth to you. Say you have been paying $.50/click through your PPC campaigns and given your conversion rates you just break even with an averge of 100 visitors a day($50/day). In order for you to consider SEOs service the SEO should get you visitors at a sufficiently lower cost. However the difference is that there is an immense amount of initial work which tapers off with time. The SEO fee should taper off once you feel comfortable with your position so that you are just paying a seo maintenance fee just to defend your position. Lack of performance guarantee: All good SEO firms tell you the same thing. They dont control the search engines so they can not and will not guarantee results. Some firms however do offer a money back guarantee. http://www.sofizar.net/seo.php Copyright 2006 Sofizar Incorporated http://www.sofizar.net en-us Wed 26 Apr 2006 16:22:36 +0500 Wed 26 Apr 2006 16:21:34 +0500 art@sofizar.com FeedForAll v1.0 (1.0.2.0) Wed 26 Apr 2006 16:21:34 +0500