What do i need to do to drive more traffic to my site

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi i built a site around ten months ago but at the moment i am only receiving around 3 visitors a a day. it is a travel site that i write new content for but because i am still learning seo i am not sure what i have been doing wrong.

I am not sure of the basics from getting people to the site or the correct way of generating free links or if i should be submitting  my site to all these free site submitters which includes to lycos and other free services that you can find on google.

If anyone can please explain what i am doing wrong and how to generate more traffic for free then that would be great.

also can anyone recommend any free service that would help with increasing traffic and links

[RyanKent]

Hello Diane.

The first step is adding content the public desires. You mention you run a health site. What is your niche? It is important to develop a well-defined niche that your site can be well-known for. There are tons of well-known sites with deep pockets such as WebMD which could be considered "health" sites.

Once you determine your niche, the next step is adding great content. Not "ok" content to fill the site, not "good" content that is similar to the hundreds of other similar pages on the internet, but truly GREAT content. Create pages that provide readers a feeling of "oh I am so glad I found this page" and "I want to share this page with others" type of feeling.

Once you have great content relevant to your niche, then go ahead and optimize the page completely with on-page SEO. Ensure the proper use of Title, meta description, H1 headers, file names, alt tags and all the other aspects of on-page optimization you read about daily at SEOmoz.

If you have truly completed the above steps, you are now ready to begin off-page SEO. One tactic I would suggest is becoming involved in every health community you can find that talks about your niche. If your site focuses on natural health care products (herbal products, vitamins, etc) then any time you find a discussion on the topic you can become a participant. When it is relevant to do such, provide a link to an article on your site discussing the given topic. You need to be careful using this approach. If you sincerely become a member of that community and just occasionally offer a link to your site, your feedback will be well received. If every comment you offer is a link to your site, you might be blocked as a spammer.

Another approach to help get started is to share one article with other sites. I prefer to keep all my content on my site, but by selectively sharing a single article every few months you can expose your site to readers who might otherwise not find your site.

These methods have the advantage of creating relevant links to your site with appropriate anchor text, and offer the chance to drive direct traffic to your site.

[EGOL]

I strongly support all of Ryan's comments.  He gave great advice.

I notice your other questions about getting visibility for other sites.  If you can deliver on the Ryan's content suggestions you might consider getting an experienced SEO to do a "study and recommend" for the site where you believe that you can produce the best content.  This will help you set your SEO straight and advance your new content more competitively.

In a "study are recommend" the SEO learns about your site from a phone call with you and exploring it for assessment.  Then you spend an hour on the phone discussing how the site can be improved with both on-page and offpage methods.

This is can be a relatively low cost way to kick up your SEO and learn at the same time. Most importantly it can get you up to speed quickly.

If you are interested just check out the profile pages of people who you see giving generous and competent advice to see if they offer SEO services.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Diane,

Can you include your site URL so we can see if there are some basic things that you might have overlooked or that are configured wrong, which could be impacting you?

Thanks!

[ClaireH-184886]

yes the site is cheap flights gatwick which i am just re-designing at the moment http://www.cheapflightsgatwick.com

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Diane,

Some of the advice you received on your other sites can be applicable here, especially since you appear to be using the same template.

Specific to this site, my first impression was that an individual article had redirect to the home page when I went to visit the article about adults regretting not taking vacations (http://www.cheapflightsgatwick.com/adults-regret-not-taking-advantage-of-special-youth-holiday). I see 41 article abstracts or headlines above the actual specific article, in addition to three separate advertisement blocks. In addition, the banner for this page reads "IN2TOWN CHEAP FLIGHTS", and I have no idea where that came from.

Think critically as to why a user would like or value this site, and why another site would link to it. Why do I see news about Yemeni security checks on the first page of a site that is supposed to be about Gatwick? In this site, as well as another of yours based on the same template, the thumbnail images are way out of proportion. Combine that with text at the bottom that appears unnatural and keyword stuffed, and a user is going to have a hard time finding a reason to stay here. Google will also have a hard time trusting that this site answers a user's query.

[ClaireH-184886]

sorry about this, this is because we are working on the site and currently using old articles while we work out the best design, i thought this time of night people would not notice and since we get little traffic i am spending the next six hours sorting it all out so hopefully tomorrow it will have a new feel about it.

the site is more about letting people know about saving money on holiday, letting them know about holiday news and also about personal experience about holidays.

i thank you for your comments which i agree with. please bare with the site and see what you think tomorrow but while you are there please with bullet points give me some advice on you as a user and what you would like to see of the site for you to say on it and come back

[ClaireH-184886]

i would love to see a good example of a travel site or similar site to see what design method i should put in place and if i should reduce the number of articles on a page

[KeriMorgret]

I just re-read your original question and you said this was a health site. Now, I'm really confused as to which site we're talking about.

For bullet points, Google has a couple of dozen of them relating to what counts as a high quality site that can apply to any site. If you ask yourself those questions (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html), that will really get you started in the right direction.

[ClaireH-184886]

sorry my mistake ref the health site, i am not sure what i was thinking, i am working another a health site but got confused which is not easy at the moment trying to type with one hand after having the other in a steal plate after a car decided to drive on the pavement and hit my hand while trying to avoid an on coming car

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Diane,

I'm following up on older questions that are still marked unanswered. Have you been able to improve traffic to this site, or have you put it on the back burner? I still see the IN2TOWN CHEAP FLIGHTS header and Yemeni security checks article when I look at the site now.