How to Build Traffic to Your Personal Project

Guest post by: McKinley Hildebrand
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How to Build Traffic to Your Personal Project - By McKinley Hildebrand

As a retired professional, you can turn your hobby, niche interest, and business experience into a money-making opportunity online. Of course along with any opportunity, the hype may be over-simplified into "three easy fail-safe steps" which can leave any knowledgeable businessman skeptical of whether there is actually real money to be made over the internet.

The key to making your website work for you, whether by advertising or by online purchases, is providing quality content and drawing people to your site. You may have the best website in your niche on the Internet, but you won't be able to build your business or bring advertising if you don't have traffic. This article is written for the site developer who has already committed to a personal internet endeavor and possibly even contemplated SEO but does not know where to start to build traffic.

How does one build traffic to a personal project? Your time is precious in your retirement, and you want it to be spent away from business at best and on the website content itself at least. SEO is unavoidable though. The good news is that it can be done solo and with a small amount of resources. Focusing your thoughtful, careful effort in these seven areas can result in more readers.

1. Keep the Content Topnotch.

A lone developer may be tempted to focus all attention in one direction at a time, but good content cannot be sacrificed to SEO. In fact, SEO can only support quality content. It doesn't matter how well you use keywords or how well they are placed on your site if your content won't keep the readers' attention. Search engines can detect inferior content, information that is just a rehash of what is online elsewhere, or information that is repeated often in your own site. You won't increase traffic that way.

2. Don't Stuff Keywords.

People used to try to bring traffic to their sites by just using keywords over and over throughout the site. That just won't work anymore, as search engines will consider such actions spamming, and you won't build your site. It works much better to place the SEO keywords within the title, in the first sentence or two, and at the end of the article. Remember to help the search engines find your content easily, not trick them.

3. Link to Your Website

Be picky. Only high quality sites with similar content should gain your attention. Everything else is a waste of time.
After you have written articles for your site, submit them to article directories. You will be allowed to link to your project.
Do you write another blog anywhere? If so, link it back to your project. The search engines will allow this.
If you are involved in forums related to the content of your site, link to your website. The number of viewers will increase at your site as a result.
If you link internally, use anchor text.

4. Talk with Your Readers.

In an effort to stand out, some sites talk about themselves to the detriment of helping the customer. Use words such as you, you might, you will, you can, and yours to focus attention on meeting the customer or reader's needs. You want to be the helpful friend rather than the obnoxious person who calls attention to himself.

Using SEO keywords is vital, but the articles must first be interesting. Each page should be about one subject only to gain the most clarity and organization. Then go back and re-write to add context-relevant SEO keywords that support that topic. If a reader must stumble over the keywords multiple times in a particular context, consider rephrasing them for a more natural fit.

5. Make Sure You Have a Great Design That Loads Fast.

Your site has to load within seconds. If it takes too long, the average potential reader's attention will be drawn to the next option the search engine offers. With the internet's options and instant gratification, readers will frustrate quickly at a short delay.

You won't generate much traffic with an unattractive template for your project either. Poor design will not only tell the readers to move on, but Google's algorithm is smart enough to take into account a website's complexity and won't consider your site to be important enough to explore if it's too plain.

6. Maximize Knowledge of the Site

If you use web analytics software you will be able to track what has worked to bring traffic to your site. You will be able to see what pages have drawn visitors and which need some work. You will be able to track what links are the most effective and continue to develop similar ones. With you as the single site administrator, you must have statistics backing up your direction of the site's development, better than any board of directors.

Make sure your site has a site map. This will make search engines knowledgeable of your site in the same way you crave information from statistics. It is pure process-able data.The spiders search engines use will use it to understand how your site works. If you have a large website make sure your site map grows accordingly.

7. Use Meta and Title Descriptions Wisely.

Relevant and unique meta and title descriptions on each page are indispensable. The page title will help bring readers more than any other on-page SEO consideration. It usually doesn't happen that a primary term of two or three words will rank highly unless it is in the page title. Even though the Meta description tag won’t bring a high ranking, it may be a snippet beneath the listing. For that reason it should have a relevant keyword. It should also make searchers want to click on your listing.

Using SEO techniques can take time, especially for someone with limited resources to devote to the demand. For a personal project, these considerations can provide a starting point for gaining more traffic. They won't boost your search results to the top right away, but they will slowly start bringing readers, customers, and the life that your site needs to make some money for your retirement.

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How to Build Traffic to Your Personal Project - By McKinley Hildebrand

About the Author: McKinley Hildebrand

RSS for McKinley's articles - Visit McKinley's website
McKinley Hildebrand is an SEO and web marketing consultant for a car insurance comparison website. He has mostly written SEO articles with small businesses and blog developers in mind, helping people with a vision for the next step in gaining site traffic. The car insurance guide he has worked to make known has helped many save money online and is a good example of the result of successful SEO.
Click here to visit McKinley's website.

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