Secrets of Increasing Traffic to Your Corporate Website

I’m at the last session of Media Relations 2008 in San Francisco, attending a presentation by Brian Kaminski of iProspect, Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing and Dr. David Hulme, Vision Media.

Note: Lee did an excellent review of Mike Moran’s keynote from today. He also says he’s going to put his presentation on Slideshare, so I will link to it when it’s up.

Brian says:

Take Inventory & Set Goals. All goals must be measurable. There’s a 90 percent chance you need better metrics.

Execute the Fundamentals. Don’t leave out the Long Tail.

Understand your Audience. On PPC search, the niche terms tend to be less expensive. Look at negative keywords; for example, if you’re a cruise line, be sure “Tom Cruise” is a negative keyword.

Write good ad copy and metadata, test and refine.

Fix site architecture. Have relevant landing pages for your ads. Don’t try to optimize a page for 50 terms.

Understand your Community. Are you gathering quality links. Are they relevant links? Find blogs that have content related to your topic.

Understand your Organization and your Website. Look at Effort vs. Benefit.

Leverage other assets. Look at blended search. News results are the top results. Implications:

  • Optimize press releases around 1-2 terms. Embed links to specific pages.
  • Images: Use descriptive file names and optimize the “properties”
  • Videos: File name & keywords; 1-2 minute clips; Upload to YouTube & Google Video
  • Blogs: Relevant, consistent content; feed bloggers. Conversation-comments, contribute in other blogs

Lee, who I met for the first time last night, says:

SEO Fundamentals:

  1. Content is reachable; make sure the bots can get there
  2. Add new content – fresh
  3. Logical organization – chronologically and in keyword subject areas
  4. Keywords in titles, nav, content & links
  5. Quantity of quality incoming links
  6. Analytics and tracking

Use keyword research tools. Seodigger.com. Keyworddiscovery.com. Spyfu.com.

One key point: Train your spokespersons to use keywords you already rank for in their interviews. That will enable readers of stories to find your site.

Do a blog-based newsroom. Template optimized with Title tags, categories and Meta description.

Linking Tips

  1. Earn links with great content
  2. Promote content on social networks
  3. Embed links in press releases. Always have at least one full URL in press releases.
  4. Link up with partners
  5. Cross link internally
  6. Social bookmark pickups

Check out Yahoo Site Explorer.

Match News to Channel. Promote a story in various media types…e.g. Images on Flickr, Video on YouTube. Publicize your publicity. Blog about your media coverage.

Here’s the step-by-step to using news releases to generate traffic:

  1. Put news in your newsroom first, before it goes into the newswire. That gives it canonicity as the original source.
  2. Then put it on newswires.
  3. Then post the video to YouTube.
  4. Post related images to Flickr…even screen shots.
  5. Pitch blogs. This is different from blasting press releases to journalists.
  6. Build up a Twitter social network that you can use to call attention to your news.
  7. Drop links to your news coverage on your Web site or blog. Creating a blog of links to your news coverage may be a good idea.

Takeaways:

  • Research keywords
  • Map keywords to content
  • Allocate resources to
  • On-page optimization
  • Link building
  • and content promotion
  • Inventory media and promote to appropriate channels.

Check out Lee’s blog.

David Hulme presented a case study on Vision.org. This is a quarterly magazine. They have gone through 10 years of these articles and optimized. They use online press releases with links back to Website content. They have added blogs on Causes of Conflict, Family Matters and First Followers.

They have now been courting social media traffic through digg, newsvine, StumbleUpon, Reddit. David is on Naymz.

About 18 months ago they have 4,000 visitors per month. Now they’re over 100,000 visitors a month, after doing all this optimization.

It’s possible to become a Google News source if you produce lots of news content.

Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

6 thoughts on “Secrets of Increasing Traffic to Your Corporate Website”

  1. Thanks Lee, for the review of the session with Brian, Lee Odden and me. I think the Vision case study proved the point that Brian and Lee made. And today’s responses to the site continue to show that serious-minded content is in demand. Best, David Hulme

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