Websites have been affected what is being called Panda Effect and as a result less number of visitors are coming to web portals. Before going into detail on how to sustain or increase the visitors to your web property, one needs to understand why it happened.
Less traffic is coming because of drop in search engine rankings. Because most of the traffic generally comes from Search Engine and that too from Google.
From the above line, two things are worth noting. Search Engine Ranking and Search Engine Referral Traffic.
So, the strategy that needs to be adopted is two fold. Firstly, mantain your old Search Engine Rankings by improving your site content and navigation. Site content must not be duplicate. If on certain pages you think that content is of low quality then improving the content is one option or removing the page, another. Better interlinking and navigation from home page to only quality pages is a main factor.
Now, the time has come to go beyond Search Engine rankings and consider traffic from sources other than search engines. The benefit is two fold. Obviously, you will have better engagement on these other sources and you can come up with services, features specific to these sources. Secondly, your search engine ranking will automatically improve.
The knowledge of what better engagement on other sources (including social networking) has to do with search engine ranking is required at this stage. With Facebook Like, Google Plus and Twitter Tweets for your website search engines do give a social rank and search results are based by giving weightage to them too. So, better the social networking, the better is the search engine ranking as well.
The other reason for why you should invlove in social promotion and look for traffic from other sources (other than search engines) could be understand by taking a case. You have a website, say, webpany.com and on certain keyword say webpany it is coming at first position.
Now, what???
Does the promotion guy should remain silent and do no further activity or promotion because the goal of acheiving 1st position for a particular keyword has been achieved. There are still certain activities that can be done.
- Firstly, to sustain ranking on this keyword and
- Secondly, to achieve better rankings on other keywords.
Now, this was about traffic from search engines. But even after achieving rankings on multiple keywords, the traffic would again stagnate. So, one needs to look for ways to get more and more traffic from other sources. And for this social promotion is a must and this would increase visitors and search engine rankings.