Some time ago I was lucky enough to get hold of an ebook called Revenge Of The Mininet by Michael Campbell. In that book and associated tools and utilities provided by search engine optimization guru Leslie Rhode was detailed ideas and strategies about how to control the flow of PageRank through your website.

I did some modifications to my Content Management System to do just that, specifically control the flow of PageRank exactly where I wanted it in my site and my customers sites and boy, it worked like a charm.

The option I chose back then was to modify the content management system to use javascript to redirect menu links. So I changed all the regular <a href links to javascript window.location. This has worked fine and served me well.

However, at the beginning of 2005 Google, Yahoo, MSN and some of the other major players introduced a new <a tag called rel=nofollow. This tag allows you to explicitly tell the search engine spider to either follow the link or not, which is what I had done with javascript code.

Now it’s all the rage to be ‘going natural’ with SEO and I’m thinking that it might be a better option to change the content management system back to regular <a links rather than javascript. I forgot to mention that the only way the search engine spiders currently crawl any of my sites modified in this way is via a site map, either a regular html site map or now xml site maps too.

So I’m going to try and find out if this is the way to go now before making any changes. Maybe I should stick to the old adage “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”?…

There are two types of traffic and three categories.

Types of Traffic Paid v Free Paid traffic comes in many different forms. Probably the best know today is called Pay Per Click and you may recognize this term as it relates to Google’s Adwords PPC system. Although Google Adwords is still currently the most widely known and used PPC advertising system, both Yahoo and Microsoft have very similar systems that function in pretty much the same way.

With PPC you bid on keywords and when someone clicks your add you pay the PPC system bid amount.

Another paid form of advertising that used to be mainstream and is not as heavily used any more is banner ads. With the advent of PPC many people moved away from banner advertising but it’s a great way to drive traffic to your website if you pick the right venue for your banner!

There are many other paid ways to drive traffic to your site.

FREE TRAFFIC Free traffic can come from many different places too. Free traffic is generally what you get when someone searches on Google or Yahoo or MSN and you appear in the Search Engine Results Pages or SERPS.

Free traffic is the best kind of traffic and is the reason you should optimize your web pages for keywords and keyword phrases. You definitely want to pick up as much free traffic as possible. You can also get free traffic from forums by making posts, articles by having a signature file at the end of the article, blogs that you write and blogs that you post comments on etc etc etc.

Traffic Categories Traffic categories relate to the types of visitor you are trying to get to your site.

Info seekers Are looking for information and just browsing. They are not going to pay you money and are like window shoppers. If you could ask them on your website ‘ Hello madam, can I help you find something’ their answer would be ‘No thank you, I’m just looking. You get the picture. They are a general type of browser and they probably don’t really know what they are looking for. They are not very far into the buying cycle…

Shoppers Shoppers are further along in the buying cycle. They have done some general searches looking for information (as information seekers) and are now likely to be comparing similar products or services for price and features. Shoppers are hot leads and you want to be providing them with specific information, product reviews etc and will definitely want to have the opportunity to let them buy if they want. If nothing else, you want to get your shopper to give you an email address in exchange for some valuable information pertaining to their search.

Buyers Buyers are what you want! Of course Steve, duh! Well now, how many buyers are coming to your site and buying? Do you know? How many are leaving? I bet you don’t know that either and you should. Why? Because you can get that valuable information from your website if you know what to look for. What I am talking here is conversion and you need to know how well your web page is converting, so you can tweak it and make it convert better.

Anyway, buyers are the most targeted type of visitor you can get to your site and as you know by now, you should be directing them to a sales page. You’ll need to know how much you can afford to pay to send the buyer to your web page and what the conversion rate is at the page. Knowing this information is critical if you are using any of the paid advertising methods. But don’t worry, most businesses don’t have a clue about this and are losing money on PPC. If you are a small business owner you can compete with the big companies and literally steal their customers from right under their noses…

Summary Free is better and you target SEO and keyword analysis.

PPC is quick and you should test your offer, sales page and conversion rates before moving to more PPC and other forms of paid advertising…