hi all, my site seems to be stagnant on about 1500 - 2000 visitors per month, i cant seem to grow it beyond this. Im spending $100 pm on SEO, $10pm on adwords and promoting it myself. Any other ideas? (Please actually look at my site before giving generic answers such as 'build links' etc) www.aussietravellersforum.com.au
Gee great reply there Joes. If you actually read my post you will see i am already doing that. This has to be one of the most useless sites around for genuine webmaster advice!
If you look at a SpyFu analysis of your site (here) you can see your top competitors for both your organic terms and your AdWords bids. Especially on terms where you're also ranking organically, see what you can do to emulate those sites/pages which are outranking you. Based on the terms for which you're ranking organically, I'd say the best thing you could do is stop spending $100 on getting ripped off for SEO services that clearly aren't doing anything for you. Modify your link building strategy to include promotion of specific sections and even posts on the forum that feature strong keywords in the title. Modify titles and headers of certain sections of your site -- wherever it's feasible to do so without interrupting the "flow" of the pages -- to include strong keywords. Once you're saving that $100 a month it should be a cinch to invest in VBSEO, if you're not already using. I have to admit that I do not have direct experience with it but many people I've seen around marketing forums seem to swear by it. Add ShareThis or AddThis to your forum pages, so that individual sections, posts or the whole site can be posted on Twitter, Facebook etc. This is especially useful on singe post pages, and you can encourage users to do share -- it ups your links, and promotes your site to a warm market (friends of people already using your site.) Frank
Find some travel forum to promote your site, you can contact directly with well ranked travel forum owner for link exchange with your site. This is the easy way to get targeted traffic.
Looking at some of the criteria for good Google SEO... Meta Description is too long. You have 294 characters - get that down to 150 max. Meta Keywords you have 12. Google recommends 8 max. URL's on front page you have 117. Google recommends 100 max. You have no h tags at all. Bad That's just a quick look at a few criteria. I suggest your $100 SEO spend is not working too well. Review that spend would be my main recommendation. Cheers Edit: Just for appearance centre your header. It looks odd stuck to the left. Edit2: Scrub that. I opened in a browser without adblock and see why it is left now.
I think it would be rather better to advertise your site through some travel forum... Besides, you can do article marketing to get targeted traffic to your website!
(1) Hiring Themes by Design was your first mistake (2) Loose the CMS as it does not provide any info to be honest, and there is no link to the forum that i can see... (3) and I do not think you are getting nearly the traffic that you are claiming...I think some of what you are claiming maybe spider hits, and you could be counting that as real traffic. (4) You have a disadvantage, personally, I would never go to a .com.au domain as I would never have anything to do with AU, so your only target could be travelers that maybe interested.... although,your traffic may improve if you had a .com domain. (5) Get out of the travel niche and find a niche that can pull traffic. I think you have limited your niche to a limited area, and you will only find so many people that would ever be interested to begin with...you need a niche that can target everyone, not just a few.
It would be nice to include a blog. I would post something every other day about some place in Australia.