• There is no point in being first on a search term that nobody searches for
• There is no point in being on page 100 for a popular term

So what you want to do is find keywords that you have a reasonable chance of ranking high  and that do get some traffic.

First thing to do is to come up with keywords in the first place:   Just be creative and look at your webstatistics to see what terms people are already using to find you.

Now you want to know which terms are interesting.  You can use this free tool to do this.  Just enter a keyword and see how much traffic it gets.     Now select those keywords that at least get some traffic and for those  check how well you are currently doing in google.

There are tools to do this, but I prefer changing your google setting to  list 100 results per page  and just search for the terms and look for the site.  This will also give you an impression of the competition.     Now use your gut feeling to tell you  on which of those keywords you stand a chance.  (if there is heavy advertising on the term,  it will be harder,  same goes for very large competitors)

Now that you found interesting keywords, there are two very important places to put them:

• The title of the you want to be found (e.g. your homepage)
• Links to your website (e.g. signatures on forums, directory submissions, etc)

Now you might think,  I’ll put as much keywords in my title as I can think of….  Well, that does not work.   You want your title to look nice for people who see it in Google  and….  the more you put in, the less important they become to Google.       But which ones to put in?     Well our approach was to start with a lot of keywords in both the title and the site.   Let it run for some time until you are indexed properly.   Now you can start eliminating the bad ones.  Just  look in your webanalytics and see how much traffic each of the keywords brings you.     If it is a small percentage, remove it!    You probably don’t want your title not to be longer then 8 words.       If you want you can still move the keywords to some other page on your website.

This is only a very basic summery of keyword research. You can read more about this and SEO in general at:

http://seonoobs.com/
http://seomoz.org/

To check all these statistics for your site someone has developed a nice tool of which we are hosting an improved version at  www.xinureturns.com.  An other nice tool to use are the Google Webmaster Tools. It shows you much info about links to your site, keywords, errors during crawling your site, etc.   You can even set some preferences and ask for removal or reinclusion of certain content from the index.

To get more statistics about actual visitors and referrals  we use Google Analytics, which seems to be widely regarded as the best free package available at this moment.

Search Engine Optimization
One way of getting visitors is from search engines, Google in particular. There is a lot of information available about the basics, e.g. on www.seomoz.org . So what we have done is:

• remove duplicate content, every page has one URL
• put album and image names in titles and in the URL
• put important keywords in the titles on homepage, signup page, etc.

We also tried to pay a SEO company to find good keywords for us and optimize the site further for indexing, but this did not work out. At least we could not tell the difference from our statistics. Currently we do about 300 to 400 visitors from Google. More than half of the searches is on actual content related keywords, so things like ‘Paris’, ‘Trucks’, etc. But a lot of pages are still not indexed, so we hope to see further improvement in this area.

Buying Undirected Traffic
We once tried to buy undirected traffic, which gave us a lot of visitors, however the number of actual users that stick with the site is so low, that it does not justify any cost at all.

Directory Submission Services
We once tried a service that submitted our sites to A LOT of directory sites. However, we have never been able to confirm that it resulted in any visitors at all. We also tried to submit manually to some relevant directories, which takes a lot of time and does result in a few visitors, but in this area we have not been very lucky yet.

Email Newsletter
A spike in the number of sign ups resulted from a contest, which we emailed to close to a hundred thousand members of an other website. Which makes me wonder now, why we didn’t try marketing by email more often.

Social Bookmarking
Submitting your site, or one page to one of the social bookmarking sites can get you a lot of traffic. We have been very unsuccessful at this, although we can tell that it works best to submit actual content (deeplinking) on the site (a beautiful picture in our case) than the site itself.

Recently we had some success with a funny cartoon posted on reddit. Resulting in over 7000 visitors in one day. However, these visitors only visit the site very briefly and none of them became actual users.

Product Improvement
Some improvements we did to the site had an influence on gaining extra users. E.g. moving the sign up form from the homepage to a separate page and linking it with a huge button. However, most improvements just make our existing users happier, but they don’t seem to spread the word very fast. Still, we can see that most growth comes from referrals from existing users.

In my next post I will tell about what we plan to do next for our photo sharing service.

What we will do is post here at least once a week about our efforts in the area of online marketing in it’s broadest sense.   In my next post I will tell something about our products and the marketing efforts we did in the past year.