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A Webmaster Talk forums member is trying to reduce the amount of search traffic he's getting.
Allow me to explain. Basically, he's looking to even out his traffic because other sources are yielding overall traffic success. Search alone hasn't been cutting it.
What can be done to reduce the emphasis on getting traffic through search engines? The usual: link building, tools and services, community involvement, a forum, a newsletter, advertising, word of mouth, and contests.
Or you can go the extreme measure and disallow search spiders by updating your robots.txt. Still, some search traffic would be nice, right?!
The idea here is a good one. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Focus on getting traffic from a variety of sources.
Forum discussion continues at Webmaster Talk.
Comments:
katinka
04/16/2008 06:31 am
One thing you can do is to link out from popular pages (popular with the SE's) to such an extent that they no longer rank. Something else that makes some sense is to look at pages that rank for stuff that's not relevant for your website: rephrase the title-tags and do some on-page optimization so that traffic coming there becomes more relevant (and perhaps less).
Rob Abdul
04/16/2008 10:37 am
I think the title of article can be more accurate by rephrasing it to read: How to get Alternative Sources of Traffic Other Than Search Engines. I understand the notion of not putting all your eggs into one basket but even entertaining the idea of disallowing search spiders is most certainly not the way to go. What are the other sources – in the most general view? Marketing Strategy: Radio, Local/National New paper, Local/National Direct Mail, Indirect mail marketing Advertising on relevant sites – Affiliate Marketing On-Site SEO: Use sticky content – News for your industry – to get visitors returning regularly. Email a friend feature Provide RSS Feeds feature A Blog is a must have Emabed/Link to this page feature Newsletter subscription
Paul
04/16/2008 05:47 pm
I have to admit to link baiting when I wrote the title. Guess it worked :-) Yes, my objective is finding other sources, thus reducing "the percentage of search traffic" while not actually reducing the amount of it. Right now, I'm working on doing a t-shirt/cash give-away as a way to get some new content. I've been too busy to write lately. We'll see how it goes.