Is it possible to have a successful website without getting a single referral from Google? If Google was not sending you any traffic at all, would you survive? I'm curious about those of you that spend time optimizing your sites for other search engines and sources of traffic. I'm thinking about you that focus on every source of traffic other than Google. The first sources that come to my mind are: Yahoo, MSN, YouTube, Stumble, Digg, Propeller, email, etc. Can you really have success if Google is out of the equation? Is it possible to have 10,000 uniques per day without anything from Google? Can anyone share any tips on optimizing for "alternative traffic sources"? Maybe some links to useful readings, or some of your personal experiences, would be helpful. Thank you.
Most of search engine search rankings use similar metrics in different ways. For example everybody seems backlinks as an important factor. The optimization would be pretty much same I think. You could survive of course without Google traffic.
You don't see any difference in optimizing for different traffic sources? Could you get 10k daily uniques without G? Thanks.
Traffic from Google reflects organic results, so to get no traffic from Google probably means no one is really linking to you, and you don't have much content. But yes, you could get that many daily uniques without Google. It would mean you're spending a fortune on offline advertising.
Let's say (for the sake of discussion) that G has banned your domain. So you will not get any Google traffic. Your domain is not banned by any other search engine. Does that change anything for you? Offline advertising... Neat! I've never put much thought into that. Thank you.
I've spent time trying to get good back links that generate traffic. Then google comes along and sees those links and ends up sending more traffic than the back links.
Were you banned from google or something? I think that people focus on them because they are the biggest, and also doing well with them typically means you are doing something right that the other search engines like too. Matt
I'm sick of the concentration on G. There are other sources of traffic out there. I am hoping that someone with real knowledge and skill in optimizing for other sources will stumble on this and drop a few bread crumbs. Nope not banned yet, but that is always a possibility with G. Only knowing how to rank with G seems to be a bit foolish to me.
You're not alone Jim. I would guess that most people here depend on G for 90% + of their traffic. So wouldn't it make sense to really become an expert on other sources? Anyone here know where I can get started?
Articles will generally generate quite a bit of traffic to a site through links in the bio section, or in the article itself. I rather agree, though, about Google (per above post). The only sites, etc., that I have that are doing very very well are those ones that Google "likes".
Yeah, direct traffic from articles is interesting. Think you could get 10k uniques per day simply from direct article referrals? Think you could even get 100 per day? Is that possibly because you have not thought outside of the "Google box"? There is a mindset here that you are G's friend and then get lots of action, or you are not "liked" by G so you get no customers. Maybe that is more because of our marketing techniques, and not because Google holds the only traffic key in town? There are webmasters out there that spend 90%+ of their time on optimizing for alternative sources of traffic. I wonder how they do it, and what works/ doesn't work.
I work at a variety of traffic sources: • Optimizing for the search engines. • Submitting to a number of "dofollow" social bookmarking sites. • An ongoing direct email effort aimed at qualified people interested in my website's niche. • Writing good content, so that people naturally choose to link back to my site. • I recently added a "Bookmark This" button to all my pages and am getting results there. • Et cetera
Of course, but why should you focus solely on optimisation for search-engines? There are other types of website optimisation too, as Jim mentioned in the previous post. You should optimise your website for that source that drives most of the traffic to your website or yields the best revenue. Of course, it can be more than one source. If Big G drive most of the traffic to your website, then by all means stick to search-engine optimisation for Big G. I recommend to analyse your website statistics, see where most of the traffic comes from and which source(-s) is (are) best to focus on during optimisation.