This question came up on Linkedin sometime back. I answered this and it got a thumbs up from the questioner. I’ve elaborated a bit on the answer to provide some tips on how to increase your site traffic without an SEO strategy.
I believe that a content strategy is critical. However, while content needs to evolve and expand for a website to offer added value to its visitors, it’s still possible to leverage other avenues on the web without resorting to black-hat SEO techniques.
Here’ s a quick explanation on how to do this:
1. Optimize your site:
Ensure that you have your meta content filled out, use other basic attributes like Alt tags to describe images in more detail, the summary attribute to describe the contents of a table or the ‘longdesc’ attribute to describe flash (if you have any). This will ensure that the search engines do not miss out on any content and index whatever you have.
2. Check your keywords:
Assuming that your site will remain constant and you’re SEO’d it to the max, it’s possible that you’ve missed out on some long-tail keywords (those are user search terms which are like phrases but more specific e.g. Florida Daytona beach summer vacation as opposed to summer vacation). Identify those keywords using wordtracker or Google’s Keyword tool and insert them into your existing content. Don’t overpopulate your content with keywords, use a suitable keyword density.
3. Submit a Sitemap:
A good tool to use is www.xml-sitemaps.com. It will create an XML, ROR, and HTML sitemap for your website – check out the deal thoroughly though, there are some minor charges involved. Use Google Webmaster tools to check if your sitemap is being indexed by Google’s spiders. Also, it will create a URL list of all your pages to submit to Yahoo for indexing – submit here at http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html. This is again more like a just-in-case suggestion.
4. Leverage social networks :
All the popular social networks in play are social ecosystems where most of their members spend valuable time online. Within these ecosystems, many folks are aligning with interests similar to their own. This could be something as simple as an affiliation to a brand – see Contiki’s page on Facebook, or becoming a fan of a rock band’s MySpace music page. Check Twitter out and identify folks who are tweeting about your brand. Follow them and begin tweeting value-added tweets to build your own list of followers. Use a url shortener like Bit.ly to drive traffic back to your website.
The point is that once you identify a group with similarities to your product/service/web property, you can always either create a platform and build a mini-community around it or just link back to your site.
5. Use blogging sites:
Since no new content is involved, there’s no sense in creating a blog (this is something I would normally recommend). But, once you identify blogs relevant to your product, make sure that you comment on them about your site and (of course!) insert a hyperlink to your site.
6. Leverage Affiliate marketing services:
Go to Commission Junction or Performics, they usually have a large advertiser roster who are willing place ads linking back to your site on their web properties. Of course, this is not free as most of these services work on a CPA basis – there’s also a setup fee. So, once you define an action (sales, booking, email subscription etc), you have to set a dollar amount as payback to the piper. I don’t like using this as much since your ad will get clustered with many other ads which many be selling soap, comic books or used tires but, if you want traffic without SEO, here you go…
7. PPC:
As simple as it sounds. Buy clicks from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. You can buy as much traffic as you want. It’s also more effective than using affiliate networks.
8. Seek synergistic partners:
If you’re a baby boomer brand, try to partner with other brands that have a message targeting your market. If the two of you are able to exchange ad space on each other’s web properties, you just helped each other. Note, that I’m talking about partnering with peers and not a shady link farm.
This was an interesting question to pursue. However, I’m strongly in favor of a well-thought-out Internet marketing strategy involving SEO, SEM, SMO, Social Networks and Email marketing to drive demand generation, develop the brand’s online identity and increase on-site conversion.
