SEO and website traffic

[Ganondorf]

Recently, I've been trying to complete one of the referral for free item schemes and prove to myself that I can successfully get enough traffic to a site that will make goal 1 possible.

Understanding that my website (Get a free iPod Touch by Apple ! Completely legitimate, tested, and PROVEN!) falls into a strange and hardly advertisable niche, I set out to try to use SEO tactics among other things to get traffic.

Obviously, I'm not succeeding. I optimized my site for SEO. I even made a YouTube video to get some traffic from there. Ironically, I don't place very high on youtube search results.

I tried getting more sites linking to me. I posted on forums, I dugg my video and website (which no one cared about and/or dugg).

Basically,

HOW THE **** DO I GET TRAFFIC?

Thank you.

[Perma]

Make a site that people will actually want to visit, not an ad-loaded cash cow. Once you have a sizeable userbase, then try to monetize off of it.

[lpxxfaintxx]

Originally Posted by Perma

Make a site that people will actually want to visit, not an ad-loaded cash cow. Once you have a sizeable userbase, then try to monetize off of it.

I disagree.

There are hundreds of webmasters making tons and tons of money via affiliate marketting.

Vash, you are trying to compete in a highly competitive niche. There are hundreds of sites like yours, and a lot of them are ran by experienced SEO gurus. Posting a few links here and there is not going to improve your SEO rankings at all. You'll need thousands of backlinks, and still you might be stuck in sandbox.

You'll need to find a creative way of marketing-- something unique. Trick people, advertise to your school, etc.

[Ganondorf]

It's not ad-loaded...

And lpx, you're 100% correct. And is there any way for me to achieve that status? No.

In the end, it's pretty clear who's the loser here. Me. For trying, and for failing.

I know there isn't really any way that I'm going to get my greens besides trading.

[Perma]

I realize that I'm going to be shunned for saying this, but if you want to know how to monopolize on a website that will appeal to a sizeable audience, take a look at WoW Hacks | Runescape| Counter strike.

[lpxxfaintxx]

Yea, you gotta give him props for that. Although he tricks noobs, he must be getting a fair amount of money...

[Ganondorf]

Perma, I'm not trying to make money on a website via advertising/being an *******. I'm trying to get referrals to complete one of the free ipod touch offers.

[BlaZeR]

Try social bookmarking sites

[lpxxfaintxx]

lol, won't work. Social bookmarking sites like stumbleupon, digg, and reddit are made of mostly tech users.

[Ganondorf]

LPX, hook me up with one of your savvy webmaster secrets.

[YourMother]

a little Christmas present from me for you:

to get a good google ranking you need time to understand google and time that google is ranking you high. You can't expect a top 4 ranking after 2 days or weeks ... more after 2 two month of hard work.
What you need: backlinks. And no idiot backlinks from the thousands of webcatalogs. You need high quality backlinks from pages with similar content and/or high page rank. Sometimes social bookmark links are helping. But you have to take care that the social bookmark site is using no nofollow attribute (=google won't follow the link to your site = useless link) ... or links from bwhacks are also useless (link hiding, SEO reasons).

Here some social bookmark services (some are German) and if they are using nofollow (pr = Page Rank)

Social Bookmarking
PR8
Del.Icio.Us - NoFollow - English

PR7
Mister-Wong
Linkarena
Lufee - NoFollow

PR6
Social-Bookmarking.SeekXL.de
Icio

PR5
Yahoo MyWeb (link hiding?)
Alltagz - NoFollow

PR4
Klickts
Infopirat
NetSelektor - NoFollow
Weblinkr - NoFollow

PR3
Maodi - NoFollow
Linksilo
Etory
Webbrille - NoFollow


PR0
Oneview
Linkarchiv.at - NoFollow

Social News / Social Voting
PR9
Slashdot - NoFollow - English - Tech stuff and Gadgets

PR8
Digg - English
Reddit - English
StumbleUpon - NoFollow - English

PR7
Yigg
Fark - NoFollow - English

PR6
Folkd - International
Shortnews - NoFollow
Wikio - NoFollow
Tausendreporter - NoFollow

PR5
SEOigg -
Newstube
NewsKick -
Mixano - NoFollow

PR4
Readster
Gamebuzz -
Newsider - NoFollow

PR3
GoTrendy
Colivia - NoFollow
Findz - NoFollow

PR2
Lieblnk - NoFollow -

... and no real human beeing is using soical bookmarks. It's only for google.

And content is king. Make a blog with interesting UNIQUE content/benefit, and take care that the blog is SEO optimized (most standard blogs use nofollow, no key words, ....).
The best you are starting with a uncommon key word combination and not something like "free iTouch, iPhone, sex, free money, ...".
Example: when you try to get traffic for the key word combination "starcraft" and "drop hack" your url should look like this: www.blablabla.com/starcraft-drop-hack.hml with the page title "starcraft drop hack" (and not "OMGZ!!!! come here you dirty motherfücker and get here a FREE starcraft drop hack and free money or if you wish a -F-R-E-E- handjob!!!! I SWEAR on the Bible - AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGH").

"old" sites are getting a higher ranking; google checks sites with high page rank (7 and higher) every few hours, a site with page rank 0 every month.
Use google sitemaps (xml); do you have a robots.txt?
And that's not everything. You have to take care of soo many things.

btw: no one with a brain is searching for or clicking on a link that's called "get a free iTouch"

GL and Merry Christmas!

[Ganondorf]

Originally Posted by YourMother

a little Christmas present from me for you:

to get a good google ranking you need time to understand google and time that google is ranking you high. You can't expect a top 4 ranking after 2 days or weeks ... more after 2 two month of hard work.
What you need: backlinks. And no idiot backlinks from the thousands of webcatalogs. You need high quality backlinks from pages with similar content and/or high page rank. Sometimes social bookmark links are helping. But you have to take care that the social bookmark site is using no nofollow attribute (=google won't follow the link to your site = useless link) ... or links from bwhacks are also useless (link hiding, SEO reasons).

Here some social bookmark services (some are German) and if they are using nofollow (pr = Page Rank)

... and no real human beeing is using soical bookmarks. It's only for google.

And content is king. Make a blog with interesting UNIQUE content/benefit, and take care that the blog is SEO optimized (most standard blogs use nofollow, no key words, ....).
The best you are starting with a uncommon key word combination and not something like "free iTouch, iPhone, sex, free money, ...".
Example: when you try to get traffic for the key word combination "starcraft" and "drop hack" your url should look like this: www.blablabla.com/starcraft-drop-hack.hml with the page title "starcraft drop hack" (and not "OMGZ!!!! come here you dirty motherfücker and get here a FREE starcraft drop hack and free money or if you wish a -F-R-E-E- handjob!!!! I SWEAR on the Bible - AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGH").

"old" sites are getting a higher ranking; google checks sites with high page rank (7 and higher) every few hours, a site with page rank 0 every month.
Use google sitemaps (xml); do you have a robots.txt?
And that's not everything. You have to take care of soo many things.

btw: no one with a brain is searching for or clicking on a link that's called "get a free iTouch"

GL and Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas.

Since you sound like a seasoned pro, and I'm lazy, can I just use a blog CMS like WordPress on my site?

Maybe I'll get around to coding my own but I'm not exactly a HTML/PHP clean code guru.

Also, should I remove all keyword bolding/italics/etc.

btw: no one with a brain is searching for or clicking on a link that's called "get a free iTouch"

Are you saying to trick people into coming to my site, or are you saying that it should be like "Learn about the iPod Touch" or something irrelevant to getting it free.

Oh, and YourMother, one more thing. Thanks.

[YourMother]

I am no pro. I am just a little bit interested and using it somewhere for a product. And it's important that this product use good listed in google ... but it's not too hard.

WordPress: yes, you can use it. But you need to pimp it up with the common seo addons, and you have to use the addon against this nofollow thingy in word press.

own html site: you can use a software like Dreamweaver. It's quite easy to use and makes a clean code and you can still can change things in the code.

bold/italic: nope, u can use it. everything that is in <h1>keyword</h1> (big font headline) is important for google. The same with bold text (but not so important).

free iTouch thingy: well, I personally never would search for "free iPod iTouch", because I don't believe in offers like this. Do you think that some1 would search for this words? I would rather search for cheap iTouch when I am interested in an iTouch. And than maybe click on your link when I see it in the search results.
Before you starting this SEO thingy you have to think about what the peops are searching for, what way people are using/ could use. Make a list with relevant key words / key word combinations; and read seo boards.

... and np, you are welcome ;)