Traffic from Business.com

Very, very little. I'm sure that traffic will vary depending upon the cross section of your target market with business.com's demographics, but for my site, I am surprised when I see a referral from there.

Ajdee:

I love your questions. I'm also searching for sources of traffic, whether its through different search engines, directories, via better keywords, any which way. I check all your posts because we are looking for the experience of others in gaining traffic. We are not in business.com. We are primarily a regional site with high SERPs for national phrases and most importantly regional phrases. We have learned that our keywords are really not that often searched. So we look for other regional phrases that A) we can compete on and B) are somewhat relevant to our business and market.

I'd love to hear from different webmasters as to the type of site they have and where their traffic comes from and how they grow it. Whether you have a directory, an information site, selling something across the web, offering services, or a regional business like ours it would be helpful for people with similar experiences to discuss their success and efforts. I know you have a directory so my experiences aren't very relevant ...but anyway keep asking the questions.

Dave

Visit ALL of your competitors sites and snoop them real good, taking note of what the are SEOed for... check those SERPs... look for a stats button on their pages and click it ... most people think that alexa is worthless but sometimes it will tell you who is getting massive traffic... spend the money for a week of wordtracker and live there... run google adwords to confirm... use excel and load up enough adwords to choke a horse and see what gets lots of impressions... become a student of spam, we might think that they are drivel but lots of those guys are really smart... read your logs for the stuff that you are getting a few hits for... there could be big traffic there if you tweak your pages.

Who else has some ideas??? IMO it is far easier to double your traffic through keyword research than it is to double it by getting backlinks.

Very good advices EGOL, like always. Pure gold.

I will try wordtracker for a week, and continue working on AdWords. Just curious, why are you using excel to store your keywords? Also is there any reason why you don't list your site(s) in your signature?

ajdee

Because I play for thousands of them... and use find/replace to manufacture all of the variants.





There are a lot of people around these forums who are calling in fire on their own positions... thats a high price for a few temporarly PR3 sigs with a couple hundred outlinks that have zero theme with their site and give them no real qualified traffic. What's the traffic difference for being #1 vs. #2?

Egol, good advice.

One other note, I have read often on this and other forums that on-page accounts for less than 20% of the variables within G's SERP placement. Causing some to almost ignore the fine tuning of their pages. If you are sitting at position #X out of several hundred thousand to millions of pages, how many positions will you climb within Google by optimizing your on-page for Google? I have had experience of moving many SERP positions by tweaking my on-page. My BLs get me into the ballgame, but I beat the other higher PR sites through on-page SEO. To be at the top of the SERPs, careful attention has to be paid to your KWs and on-page structure.

Egol:


Thanks for your comments. We are a regional business as our all our competitors. We rank 6th nationally for our main keyword phrase. Every competitor uses that phrase. We rank 1 in google for 2 variations. #1 in yahoo and #3 in MSN for the main phrase. Local variations on the phrase actually turn up business. We are all over #1 for local variations on the phrase.

Currently we are picking up phrases that are a bit of a twist on the regional phrases to attract more potential regional buyers that have overlapping interests. One thing that happened was that as we rose in the SERPS and in PR we started getting hits for obscure phrases that alerted us to searching for variations on our keyword phrases. Those definately add phrases. Lately I've seen traffic from 4 or 5 blogs that reference our site. Haven't seen the entries. Hopefully its good but I don't know. The traffic lasts about 3 days at most. Thinking of getting into blogs on a regular basis.

Dave