One way to get better rank and positioning in the search engines is to allow your website to grow over time.

This is, obviously not for a mini-site (created solely for the purpose of selling an ebook) although I have certainly taken a mini-site and grown it into a larger content site behind the sales letter in the past.

Building Value into Your Website

If you are redesigning your website, or growing it for search engine boost and traffic, don’t just add more content on the same topic. Spin off your topic to something closely related and incredibly useful to your visitor.

A few ideas are:

• Add a directory of free offers and products related to your topic. This still brings a a lot of traffic to niche sites. You can include pay-per-lead offers, or cookie-setting affiliate offers, or take it one step further and request a monthly fee from webmasters wanting to submit their free products to grab some of your traffic. You, of course, want to be very careful with what or who you’re linking to in this regard both for your reputation’s and your search engine rankings sake. Finally, to promote your ‘free offers’ page or directory take a few hours and find other free offer sites to trade links with.
• Add definitions and terms pages. Another traffic-puller. Since so many people are still surfing the web for knowledge and information, if your site has a page explaining in detail the terminology of your niche market you will get traffic. Recent experience shows me that just a few sentences per term is no longer enough. You need a few paragraphs of each to gain search engine traffic from this technique. The best part about this technique however is not the gain in search engine positioning, but the increase of value in your visitor’s mind. Your site is obviously the ‘expert’ site on this topic in their eyes.
• Another very important step when you’re growing your site is to take the time during this phase to check every affiliate link. After redesigning Smartzville last week I did this and found that 50% of my year old links to resources and associated merchants led to new offers (and not always related) or websites that were no longer available. Frustrating, but something you want to watch out for more often than annually when you have a high traffic website.
• While you’re checking your outbound links assess every one, once more. For instance if you’re linking out to an ebook (where you make money as an affiliate) and you realize that you’ve never made one sale of that product, dump it. Take time to test and review a new, related product that may convert better. Don’t waste your out-going links or promotions willy-nilly. Concentrate
  on finding the ones that sell and drop the ones that don’t.
• Add a section to your site that educates and informs your website visitors, priming them for the offer by training them to see the value of the coming offer. Then you can lead your educated prospects to your sales page. As an example, if you were selling investing tips one entire section of your website could be devoted to the subject “How and why to invest…”, that linked to the more advanced member’s area or ebook.
• Assess your navigation and traffic flow. You may want to get a friend to sit in front of your computer and watch how a new visitor experiences and navigates your site. When you are redesigning or adding new sections to your site consider also the ‘nofollow’ tag recently adopted by Google. (If you don’t know about this, run a Google search on it.) You don’t want to be leaking rank onto non-performing pages. Keep your rank on your sales pages and home page.
• Add interaction! Online games, quizzes, and reader polls make your visitor think that your site was created just for them! You can find a lot of these – although not specialized – free online to cut and paste into your web pages. If you don’t have a geek-ish mind you can find programmers who will be happy to create something for you relatively cheaply.

That’s my time for today! I do hope this brief article lends a few ideas to your marketing while you grow your website, increase search engine traffic and build a valuable resource for your visitors.

Laura Childs
www.makemoneywithyourideas.com

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