Everybody strives to gain traffic for their sites, the faster, the better, if possible overnight. Every beginner blogger dreams of the day when his blog will reach a million users per month or per day or per minute or per second or per split second or… You know already the recipe for success, as there are millions of sites giving you the same advice and mentioning patience and perseverence above all. But did it ever occur to you to think how to proceed to lose traffic? If there was a contest of the fastest traffic loser of all with a very high prize for the winner?
A ten steps scenario would look like this:
- delete all META tags from your pages
- take out the keywords from titles and headlines
- make sure your site loads in more than 60 seconds: use high quality pictures, with size over 1Mb
- make sure your links lead nowhere, or to sites that are no longer active, or to sites not related to the subject
- if somebody dares to leave a comment on your site, answer him that he should go study some more, then open his mouth to speak.
- organize weekly contests, let people in, then announce in the last day that you changed your mind and the contest is off
- stuff your articles with lots of grammar mistakes
- make ads fly all over the screen and let no possibility of making them disappear
- make your pages jump automatically from one to another at intervals of 5 seconds
- make all your pages black and forget all 9 steps above
Any more ideas?
10 Comments
I think you overestimate the meta tags. Few search engines even consider them anymore.
@methinks: you may be right. Nevertheless, I think the description tag is important, because it determines how your site looks in SERPs. You can use it to put keywords in, thus making those words to appear in bold when searched for.
Simonne
That list caused me to laugh out loud! I’ve seen a few sites that have done ALL those things in the past.
I might even have been guilty of a lot of them myself.
I think Google’s advice to build good content for your visitors is so simple that a lot of people overlook it, but it’s very good advice.
Focusing on what the visitor wants is more likely to bring them back, isn’t it? And it’s great to get visitors, but even more important to keep them coming back.
Hey Amin,
Thank you for stopping by. You are correct, writing good content helps, but you know how hard it is to do it, so people would rather find other solutions. Then they wonder that readers are not coming back.
Hey Simonne!
That has to count as the fastest blog response I’ve ever had!
I think you’re right. Because it’s hard work a lot of people shy away from doing it.
I guess that’s also why people buy into money making schemes that promise them riches for doing nothing. You can make a lot of money relatively easily on the internet, but you can bet there’ll be some work involved somewhere.
Personally, since I love using my computer, I don’t have a problem doing the work. In fact, I have to be torn away from the computer at some ridiculous hour of the early morning!
Call it a coincindence, Amin! I moderate comments only twice a day
. If you like what you are doing, then you don’t feel like working. Nevertheless, if you don’t do a thing and wait to get rich, all you do is make others rich by buying that stuff.
You forgot:
Add annoying background music to the site and make sure there’s no way to turn it off.
Ha! This should have been no one on the list. I hate such sites! Can you imagine that I have clients who beg me to do this for their sites?
Simonne: Actually, the first sentence of the page is acutally more important than the description tag.
Yes, Jejo, you are right. The above list is not ranked according to the importance of the factors, I just wrote the items as they came to my mind.
5 Trackbacks
How to get more traffic on your website : Carnival of Traffic Building…
This is the first edition of the carnival of traffic building. It contains links to very interesting articles about “how to get more traffic on your website”. If you want to get more visitors on your website, this is the place to start…
[...] 10 ways to lose traffic [...]
[...] 10 ways to lose traffic [...]
[...] 10 ways to lose traffic [...]
[...] Simonne over at All Tips and Tricks has a nice post on the Top 10 Ways to Lose All Your Readers [...]