Some weeks ago I explained you the difference between Social Traffic and Search Engine Traffic and I told you it is recommended to work on build Search Engine Traffic because with a little work it grows up month by month without having to put as much effort on it as the Social Traffic need. Here are some key factors to increase this traffic:

• Write content constantly, do it daily or almost daily. This is due to two reasons. First one, Search Engines love webs/blogs that update content often so this sites usually rank better than static ones. Second reason, if you have a lot of content there are more chances of being a result of a search, don’t you think it is logical?
• Write good titles for your posts or articles. I mean you have to place some keywords in it, and don’t write too long titles with many words in it. There is a thing called “Keyword density” and it is the ratio of keywords to total words. You must find the point of equilibrium between good titles for your readers and good titles for search engines. Look at the title of this post, Key Factors To Increase Search Engine Traffic, it couldn’t be better. I placed as much keywords as I could (search, engine, traffic, increase, key, factors) and also it is good for readers. This time was easy, other times it is more difficult.
• Place keywords in the post, specially in the first paragraph, and bold them to increase their relevance as I did above. The keyword density is also important in the content, not only in the title. There are people who take in count the exact ratio of keywords to total words and tell about ratios of 15%, 18% as the best ones … I think it is a bit exaggerated to take things so far. Just place your keywords in the text and bold them. You must be aware it may be dangerous to repeat too many times the same keyword in your post. A search engine may notice you want to rank better for that keyword in a not natural way so you can be penalized.
• Write content daily or almost daily…mmm wait, I told you this one before. Yes, it is the most important. Don’t forget it.

This are tactics from the point of view of the content. There is another point of view, the marketing, but we will discuss it other day

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It has been more than a month since Alexa released its new algorithm. Perhaps some of you, non blogger readers, don’t know what Alexa is. It is a service which provides traffic ranks for the websites and blogs available out there in the Internet. The problem was that Alexa’s rank was only based on the traffic preferences of the people who had installed the Alexa Toolbar. As you have noticed it can’t be representative of real web traffic because not everyone has installed this toolbar. Due to this “special characteristic” people began to complain about the bad quality of Alexa’s rank as a web traffic measurement, and finally, a little more than a month ago, Alexa started running a new algorithm which, as they said, takes in count much more general factors to generate the rank.

Once explained that let’s see some results. I compared three high traffic web spaces, two blogs and a Spanish forum:

• JohnChow.com: for the ones who don’t know him, John Chow is a really big blogger star. He earns more than $30K per month only with his blog, apart from other business he has.
• ShoeMoney.com: another guy at the level of John Chow or perhaps higher (sorry John). He runs several business apart his blog, and like John, he has very high web traffic in it.
• ForoCoches.com: well I wanted a neutral web space, so I thought of a general forum. This is an Spanish forum which in spite of have been about cars in the beginning nowadays it is about more general topics.

Let’s see their Alexa’s rank graphic:

You can see how there is a change in the trend of the three web spaces, perhaps less change in Shoemoney’s. What happened? As I told you Alexa’s rank before the change was based in the preferences of the people who had installed the toolbar. What kind of user do you think is more probably to have it installed? The answer is the blogger user. This kind of user is always paying attention to ranks and stats, and the normal user doesn’t do that so he doesn’t need to have installed this tool. Since the usual web traffic of John Chow and ShoeMoney is made from bloggers and the usual web traffic of ForoCoches is made from normal Internet users here we have the reason of this new trends. It seems new Alexa’s algorithm is working more effectively than the previous one because it is taking in count general factors to make the rank.

I would like to make use of this opportunity, now we are talking about Alexa, to tell you my current rank is 459.385 and I’m improving it almost daily so help me to improve it still more and visit the Binary Ant everyday.

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In Shoemoney’s “Answers To Questions Round 6″ one of those questions was about Twitter, well about how to earn money using Twitter but forget this topic, it’s not the target of this post. In the answer Shoemoney said Twitter had become the 4st largest source of referral traffic, yes, he said the 4st!! This is really big because he has thousands of visitors each day.

How does he get this traffic? Let’s leave apart the fact he is a blogger star. If you have a look at his tweets you will see he posts tweets quite often, almost every hour. Some of them are related with new blog posts, some of them tells about what he is doing AND some of them are totally empty and useless tweets. It doesn’t matter what you say, the objective is tweet and tweet often. He has almost 3000 followers and a big amount of them surely follow him because he is Shoemoney, but I’m sure there is a percent of his followers that play the tricky tactic of follow massively to get some follow back response. Of course they crash into a hard rock because nowadays Shoe is following only 50 tweeters.

So what we get in conclussion? I think we can extract that Twitter is a really good tool for traffic building. And how can we make it work like him? First of all we need followers, lots of followers. We can try the tricky and spammy way of massive following but I’m going to play a sharper and better looking tactic: masive twitter posting. The reason is that twitter spammers use to sit in front of Twitter Public Time Line and follow every user that had recently post in hope of getting some back response. So I’ll try it to get some spam followers. Like “money attracts money” I think “followers attract followers”. If you have lots of followers people may think you are important and then start to follow you.

Why don’t you start to follow me?

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few weeks ago I saw in my stats (not this site stats, this is too new) a detail that made me think if there were kinds of traffic and if so which ones were better than others. As I said just a second all of this comes from the numbers and the stats. My search engine traffic has grown month by month since I started blogging three months ago and I did nothing special to achieve it, only some SEO advices and writing content. However my social traffic took me much more effort to build and it doesn’t grow as fast as my search engine traffic. So I started thinking of different kinds of traffic. I’m going to deal with two of them, I think the most relevant for blogging. These two kinds of traffic comes from two different strategies:

• Directly promoted methods: these are the ways the webmaster works directly, like link baiting, social networks, taking part in other blogs by comments, collaborations. This is  an active way to get yourself known, a set of social techniques. And the traffic derived from these techniques is the one we can call social traffic.
• Non directly promoted methods: here I basically include search engines. It is true that good or bad results at this level are directly related with the skills of the webmaster on SEO techniques , but a really good SEO work doesn’t mean you have to index manually every page you create, this is the job of the searchbots or spiders, so this method is somehow passive when compared with the first method. Your traffic is the result of a search, is essentially functional traffic or search engine traffic.

There are lots of differences between these two kinds of traffic. When your traffic comes mostly from directly promoted methods you will note some a decrease in traffic graphics over the weekend because this traffic is mostly made up of social interconnections and most of the visitors are bloggers who enter in your blog to see what’s new today. But like you they also need the weekend to rest.

What about search engine traffic or functional traffic? This traffic is different. Those visitors come in your blog because you are the result of something specific they’re looking for. It is not part of a social circle that you’re creating. Somewhere in the world someone is looking for something about you could give some useful information, and it doesn’t matter who you are or how many social visitors you have. This is the reason why functional traffic keeps working day by day independently which day of the week is.

This is one of the most important keys of the success of a website, blog or Web service in general. Knowing how to promote your site to attract as much functional traffic as possible. You can have one hundred friends who come every day to your blog and you’ll have at least one hundred visits a day, but the real merit is to make a hundred, two hundred or a thousand strangers enter your blog instead of go in another of the thousands of blogs that can also give them the answer they are looking for.

Functional traffic, this is the one we want to get because it provides us with much more possibilities.

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As you can see in the sidebar I’m running Entrecard’s widget, a well known exchange network that helps you in traffic building.

Now Entrecard presents a new feature that improves its service and satisfies a lot of bloggers who were claiming for it. This is the ability to add more than one blog per account. To celebrate this event Entrecard is running some contests and giving away a free eBook that will help you to get more juice from your Entrecard account.

If you want to earn 2000 Entrecard credits only have to spread their word and tell about their new feature and new ebook. You can get mor information about this from Entrecard.

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