Ski Jungle is getting up to 2,000 page views daily*
A Beginners' Guide to Increasing their Web Site
Traffic
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What can you do to boost your website traffic that doesn't cost the earth?
* as at Jan 8 2007
- During the first week of Jan 2007 Ski Jungle's weekly visitors reached 5,000. Of course they were not looking at all
the pages in the ski directory
and this figure is no great shakes when compared with the big boys, but if you are currently getting few or no visitors, a free listing
is a start and it costs nothing. For example, if you are selling chalet holidays in Morzine, you will have had
132 people looking at
your listing during December - all for free, and if you are at the top or near the top then you will have had no competition either!
Remember they arrived on the page because they wanted to check out ski chalets in Morzine, and they found your site fast via a
few clicks as though it were at the top of Google! On most of the Ski Jungle pages that are being monitored the click through rate to
other clients' web sites is between 30% and 40% so that's 30-40 people a month going to your site for free!
If your site is not yet listed go to the
add a link page. You will be placed on the
top of the page until someone else wants a listing on that page. All you have to do for us in return is to place a Ski Jungle link back to
us on one of your pages. This is very important as your listing will not
be added if you don't link Ski Jungle back to us first! If you can't do it yourself your webmaster will be able to in less than five minutes. If you put the link in a prominent
position and take the small blue Ski Jungle banner as well, we will keep your listing more prominent too. For a good general directory for
sites that are not skiing or snowboarding oriented, try
www.powersourcing.com/.
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- You could also put a banner at the top of your selected link page in Ski Jungle. Banner Ads do get seen as
long as they are not one of twenty on a page, and are on pages that visitors occasionally look at! Ski Jungle pages are being restricted to
a top and bottom banner per page - it is to early to define the true value of each page yet, but we are getting a good idea and have made a
pricing judgement based on their position in the Ski Jungle 'tree' and the number of times they have been clicked on. You have the choice of
putting your banner on any page you want and paying for any number of inclusions.
If you don't have a banner talk to us. We can make up a simple one without animation (the best) for £5. The cost for a banner
placement is £55($100) for a year.
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- You are probably wondering what Ski Jungle gets out of a free listing. Well, your listing on Ski Jungle
doesn't just boost traffic to your site by being clicked on. It promotes ours as well. Many search engines may list you higher in their
rankings because you have exchanged links with Ski Jungle, or any other like minded similar site with a good page ranking*. It's the same in
reverse for us.
Google and Yahoo, who have more traffic passing through them in a day than the M25 in a year** (over
65% of worldwide searches), are
particularly partial to a high number of reciprocal links between good sites. The more of these good reciprocal links you have, the higher
your own site will be ranked, and therefore the more traffic you will get. In this way you will probably be above us before long....
Reciprocal links will cost you nothing in money to build up, but they do involve some time and they are crucial if you want your site to be
seen by the big wide skiing and snowboarding world. Getting them will involve quite a bit of work as you search the web looking for good
sites that have an empathy with yours, and sending off e-mails to ask people to exchange. Most people will be only too willing to exchange
links if they know the score - check to see if they are into linking by finding their link page first. If you can link to good sites that
are in turn getting a lot of visitors, then those visitors could well see your link and click to your site all for free!!
How many reciprocal links do you need? Well Ski Jungle started out with a foundation of 20 back in February/March
2003. I didn't email sites for
any more links and the site now has over 4,000. Some people will say you need a base of 50 to get going but if you go for 10-20 and your site
is sound and basically optimised, then you will not go far wrong by waiting for all the electronic wizardry to come and sniff at it
and index it in a search engine or two.
* page ranking is Google's classification of a website page appearing as a green stripe at the top of their own
Google Tool Bar.
Ski Jungle's is currently 5 - the longer the stripe from 1 to 10 the more they rate a website - it causes a great deal of consternation in some circles....
** the M25 is the busiest road in Britain....
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Your Own Site
- What do you think of your own site? Does it do the business? It's probable you have spent money on it
(from £50-£5000?) and are sometimes able to contact the webmaster to change a few things, but he has lost interest and is difficult to pin
down. This from my experience is the norm - and I'm talking from a punter's point of view now.
Let's look at two ends of the website spectrum. At one end is a site that has been designed by a technician with a certain amount of flair
who uses all sorts of weird and wonderful software to produce an entry page that asks you to 'wait while loading' or 'do you have Flash?',
takes two minutes to build up an impressive animated picture of the Matterhorn with a bloke skiing down it, plays some stirring excerpt from
'Ride of the Valkyries' and then crashes your computer. You try again and succeed in getting into the site only to find that there are
thousands of doors leading nowhere and you have wasted twenty minutes and still not been able to book your ski holiday to Scotland. This
designer chappie has charged £5000 and is in Costa Rica - good for him and he thanks his old clients every time another wave rolls in - but
bad news for the clients....
At the other end of the scale is a site that loads the home page before you have taken your finger off the button, is simple to understand,
has some nice easy-on-the-eye layouts and pictures, and has been designed by a like minded human with logical thought patterns. The
client got a bill for £1500, which was pretty steep at the time, but was very happy with the site as it holds the visitors, gives
positive feedback and sales, and the person who built it is still two doors down when he's needed to change something.
Which one is your site?
Of course there are lots of permutations in between and you may well be happy with your site, but if you are not you only have two positive
choices - sort it out yourself or get someone who can do it for you. A combination of the two is a third choice that I took. Two years ago I
couldn't send an email without pressing the wrong button and losing the email but was fortunate to find two long suffering friends who threw
me into the deep end and pushed me away from the side until I could swim - after a fashion....
Here are a few very basic pointers:
- Your site should be fast loading, easy to read and have a simple layout and even simpler navigation.
- A visitor will not wait long for a page to load even if he's asked to wait.
- The best sites are written in Verdana script which seems to be the easiest font to read.
The html (the code on the back of the page) should be straightforward, without
mistakes, and if possible refer to style sheets.
- A visitor will only spend 8 seconds deciding whether to stay with the first page he lands on. Whatever is there has to
hold him and draw him in - otherwise poof.... you've lost him
- All the links must work and the main menu links should be simple to operate for thickos like me who can't understand
pinging noises, rolling drop downs with arrows pointing all over the shop and
internal links that seem to be unrelated to the site you're on....
- Every site should have a contact page and a links page with some good reciprocal links!
At least your home page should be optimised for the search terms you need to promote. When the search engine spiders visit
the page they think 'ah here's a nice page' and index it their lists depending among other things on the search terms. Remember that what
seems a nice page to you may be horrible to a spider....
If your site reflects all the points I've mentioned and you are happy with it, then there is no reason why it should not welcome
visitors and sell your product for you. If you are unhappy with it and cannot do the
work yourself then I recommend a really good outfit that has helped me a lot - they will look your site over for free and tell you what
needs doing to improve it. They will also build you a top rate site if you want it and they are speedy. Go to
http://www.ukseo.com and if you don't want to wade through more of the printed
word but just want a good job doing, ring Nick Higgin on 44 (0) 1948 861 169.
To generate income from these pages try
Google AdSense. If you are writing pages about ski hire in your resort, for example, Google will place ads
from ski hire companies or similar businesses on these pages and pay you for doing it!
* These figures from Overture for March 04
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LATEST: Please note that at present some of the facts in the above
article relating to Ski Jungle and Google are not relevant as the site dropped from the top of Google and Yahoo on most search terms
in August 2004. It has taken over two years to turn things around, and Ski
Jungle is now recovering.
| Simon Dewhurst |
e-mail
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updated 8 Jan 2007 |
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