Your Main Source of Traffic

[Rich]

For this forum's first poll, I think it's an obvious one! What is your main source of traffic?

Of course, the "holy grail" is a #1 ranking in the "natural" listings on Google, but this can take a very long time to achieve. The next best solution is to use their Adwords scheme, Pay-Per-Click. Do you find that it's more cost-effective to use any of the other search engines, such as Yahoo! or MSN?

I think it might be very interesting to share some ideas on how we're all marketing our sites.

[entertaintoday]

Most of my visitors are from affiliates, mainly price comparison websites. Some of them are pay per click, others just take a percentage of sales they generate. I've generally found that Google's adwords doesn't get much of a conversion rate. maybe my products that are the problem, but when I'm advertising next gen games most of them cheaper than any other online store, I'd expect to get results. So mainly sticking to affiliates for now.

[andy@speeds]

Ours are all natural results, I've tried to concentrate on content and using the news eture to ensure that the site is always upto date. We will be doing some print ads in bike magazines over the next few months so I'll be interested to see if our hits go up.

[petad]

It's still early days for us, but we are finding a lot of links coming in from various forum links (such as Yahoo Answers), otherwise they are mainly from Google, though volumes are still very low. We haven't started any advertising or PPC yet.

Pete

[lewey]

With our older site we have relied heavily on google adwords. It was a great way to get us started and some early traffic, then as time went on and used adwords more, and got to know how to use it better, it has performed better and better for us and our main products. However had been getting frustrated at not being as high up the natural listings as wanted for that site (using a different host), so have just a couple of weeks ago launched a new site using bluepark - mainly for the more seo friendly urls and ability to custom specify title tages etc - and will rely on natural search traffic for this one. Already starting to show up equal to our long established site for a few long tail keywords, so a good start for only a couple of weeks.

[spondie]

We get a mixture of feeds, Google Adwords, email marketing and Referals from our Ebay Site, flyers in every ebay sale pushes buyers over to our main website and hopefully repeat sales. Wish i had the time to use Adwords to its full potential, its far more complex now than when it first started and you can run the risk of spending large amounts of money with little return. We are focusing on natual listings over the coming months and would welcome any tips & tricks other uses may like to share.

[petad]

Hi

I have reproduced an article below from SEO Newsletter (email), which may be of interest.
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5 Ways to Prepare Your Website for Universal Search
By Tony D. Baker (c) 2007

The way Google handles search is changing. You may not have heard of universal search yet, but it is going to affect the way your website and your company show up in search engine results, at least for Google. You may have noticed that pictures, videos and even press releases are showing up alongside websites in regular search engine results.

5 Ways to Prepare Your Website for Universal Search

You need to develop a strategy to meet these changing search conditions, and that means optimizing more than just your website landing page. Images, videos and articles are all parts of your site that could be working harder for your company. Here are five tips to help universal search work for you.
Stop the Presses
Make sure your press releases and company news are getting into Google News and Yahoo News. If you're not doing press releases, you should seriously consider it. Press releases will give you one more chance of showing up in the search engine results beyond your web page. Press releases also give people looking for information about your company the chance to see you in the best light. If you play your cards right, you might get some publicity out of the deal as well.

This is the perfect chance to one-up the competition and highlight your company as an industry leader. Even if you think you have no news, you can comment on industry trends or recent studies relating to your business. The more you get your name out there, the more results you will ultimately see.
Don't Overlook Images Images are already starting to show up in search results based on text around them and the description text in the HTML image tags. It's not difficult to get images onto your site. You can include pictures of past projects, process illustrations, graphs and charts related to your business or industry. A little creativity in this aspect of your website can pay off with your images showing up in Google search results.

Once you have the images in place on your website, make sure the search engines can find them. Pay attention to your image ALT tags, captions and surrounding text so your images show up. Always be sure to have keyword-rich descriptions with your images and use descriptive names for your files as well.


Capitalize on Video Content
Presentations, training videos, interviews and commercials could all be working harder for your company. Don't let these just sit on the server when they could be showing up in search engine results and providing even more results for your site.
Consider creating a multimedia page where customers can view these and where search engine spiders can locate them. Again, be sure to have keyword-rich titles and descriptions so search engine spiders will know what they are seeing. You might also consider distributing your videos to YouTube for extra exposure and another chance to show up in the search engine results.

Make Sure Search Engines Can Get to Your Content
Do you know if your site is easily accessible by search engine spiders? Flash-heavy sites, improper redirects and broken links can thwart your best SEO efforts. Remember, search engine spiders see your website differently than a normal user. They are looking for content and links, and it is in your best interest to be sure they can navigate your site with ease.
Above all, spiders need clear text links. Uploading a new page to your web server, while personally gratifying, may as well be invisible if you do not provide links from your main site. If you don't lay down a clear link path throughout your site, search engines may nevėr find your content. Site maps are an essential tool for making your content search-engine friendly. Make sure yours is updated regularly and submitted to Google with the proper formatting.

Don't Ruin Your Hard Work
While it's important to prepare for the future, don't overlook the basics. Keyword-rich text and title still matter for your web pages. Quality links to your site are still essential SEO components. Just because you've discovered new Internet toys doesn't mean that you should turn away from the tried-and-true methods. Use both for maximum results. By taking the time to ensure every aspect of your website is ready for universal search, you maximize your chances of getting your name in front of potential clients and customers. Follow these tips and jump to the front of the search engine multimedia race.

[Rocking Parties]

At the moment it's natural listings.

I expect a lot of traffic to come through when we use Adwords.