Are you starting a new website?

What is the best way of growing traffic flow to your website without spending big money on advertising?

With all the time and money you spent to build your new website, you must want to find out different methods to drive traffic to your website. We have participated in some products/websites launch from the very beginning and assisted quite a few companies and websites drive significant traffic to their sites.

In the next 5 minutes, you will know how we brought in 10 million Unique Visitors over the period of 12 months.

In fact, we actually did it with

1. No Ads/Pay-Per-Click/Media Buy
2. No hype

Throwing money at advertising without understanding what other options you have for Internet Marketing can be a costly mistake. There are lots of ways to market your business that are cheaper than advertising, and often times more effective. We will be talking mainly about SEO Strategy in this article. You can refer to the full Inbound Marketing Case Study for more insights on Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing.

Situation
StarAndroid is an Android Portal(China) that is dedicated to providing users with intriguing Android related content such as news, reviews, apps and games. Shortly after the website launched in late 2010, we helped to drive the Internet Marketing with the aim of increasing the number of visitors. This marketing case study will outline some of the key strategies we used to bolster the site traffic.

Solution
Our first step was to focus on the content creation, prior to implementing a search engine optimization(SEO) program on Baidu. In addition to SEO, we also planned a social media marketing strategy on Sina Weibo to increase the visibility of the brand online.

Google Analytics for 12 months

As you can see, the actual traffic surged after April 2011 once we started working on the Search Engine Optimization. Before that, we were working on content creation for literally 5 months. The traffic became more sustainable once we introduce Social Media Optimization.

Content is king and distribution is queen. To begin with, we focused on building a good base of content assets that can be indexed by search engine. This is a tedious process but with proper keyword targets, the number of possible listings in SERPs(search engine result page) increases tremendously.

Part and parcel of an SEO-friendly website are generating and sharing high-quality content to attract and engage targeted prospects. The more relevant content a business publishes on the web the higher the chances people will find it useful and share it with their friends and their social network.

Guest posts did serve as an effective supplemental tactic to off-page optimisation. With great content, guest posts become a viable method. We did a series of guest posts on the popular portal with the following end results in mind.

• Connect with partners(host)
• Awareness
• Build Authority
• Inbound Link Building

Result: Top ranking in Baidu Search Engine for the search “Android” in Chinese.

Android Keyword in Chinese ranked among the top on Baidu SERP

This is an infographic how SEO on Baidu helps to drive huge traffic to StarAndroid Website.

Infographic – StarAndroid SEO and Marketing Case Study

Since the main audience is Chinese, we spent most of our SEO efforts on Baidu, China’s most popular search engine, with approximately 80% of the country’s market share. Gaining high rankings on Baidu is the key to exposure in the Chinese Internet arena. However, SEO on Baidu requires a slightly different way of thinking about SEO compared to what you might be used to with Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Unlike Google, Baidu places significant importance on metadata such as:

• Meta descriptions
• Meta keywords
• Title tags
• Heading tags – H1 and H2 tags
• Alt tags

As you may discern, increasing the number of backlinks is one of best practices for Baidu optimization. This doesn’t mean that acquiring high-quality backlinks are less important. We foresee that in the near future, Baidu will increase the emphasis on good inbound links as well. It’s just a matter of time.

Key Takeaways

• Focus on the content first. The traffic will come.
• Don’t forget about building a solid foundation by creating valuable/evergreen content.
• Create content that helps solve a problem or brings value to the ecosystem.
• Use the Keyword Tool to build out a database of keywords.
• High-quality articles bring in the links(backlinks) naturally.
• Weibo is a crucial social network for outreach in China.

Conclusion
Build great, useful and remarkable content. With the recent Panda and Penguin updates, people are finally starting to understand that quality is the only sustainable strategy. Internet marketing, after all, is about delivering the right content to the right people, at the right time.