Traffic
How to get visitors to your website
Submitting Articles
Article submitting is an interesting way to utilize the content you already have on your website to generate more traffic and increase your search engine optimization. Most websites have some sort of textual content on them and many have actual articles either explaining their topic, reviewing their products, or showing their skills. While most websites use visual ads to sell it is a well known fact that well targeted text sells best and adds content to a website. You don’t just use text to sell though, to truly target your traffic you can create text articles that explain and educate to ensure that your visitors know what you are selling and why they might be interested in buying. So whether you create your own original articles or outsource it to experts you end up with textual content on your website that the search engines crawl and then use to rank your website for whatever terms you have discussed in the articles. But that is only the first step in increasing your traffic and fully utilizing your articles.
Unique original articles are a search engines best friend and if you want to make the most of your content you want to get as many people reading your articles as possible. To get more traffic reading your articles you can submit them to other peoples websites for them to post. There are thousands of websites that will post your articles in relevant sections and even provide you a backlink from your article that way not only do the visitors to the website read your article but they can follow the link back. As an added bonus all those websites then have a backlink that the search engines like Google can follow which can increase your websites relevance and convince the search engines that you are providing useful information and they should list your website higher in the rankings. So not only are you educating and gaining new visitors by submitting your articles to other websites but you are potentially increasing your own search engine rankings all by providing unique text content that you would have created anyways to use on your own website. Now submitting articles to thousands of websites could take you years but luckily there are automated programs that can streamline the process.
Article submitting tips:
You should always create unique and original articles, copying someone elses work won’t help you much and you should always respect copyrights!
An article should be at least 500 words so that the search engines have enough content to crawl and understand what it is you are talking about, plus that gives you more room to really explain and sell to your visitors.
Do not forget to include backlinks to your website before you submit, and try to make sure that you link to your main page as well as the sub-page where you actually are hosting the original article but do not spam your link all over, you want to be useful but not annoying.
If you outsource your article writing be sure to proofread and review your articles before you post them as some people use automated software to create the content and that usually results in gibberish and unreadable articles which might be ok for search engines but what visitor is going to buy from a site that doesn’t make sense?
Finally if you do use an automated article submitter you can use a ‘spinner’ program to alter your original article substituting words and phrases so that it looks different and that might be good to prevent the search engines from considering it duplicate content and lowering its value.
Topsites
The Basics of Topsites:
Topsites are a great way to get more traffic without a lot of work. Generally you can find large topsites that relate to your specific sites content and then simply signup and put a link to the topsite. The key of course is finding quality topsites that you can get listed on and that will send you traffic.
Most topsites are run by scripts that automate the process and rerank the list of links at a preset time or amount so it can pay to analyze how the scripts work and possibly try and send more traffic before the rerank. Topsites do not necessarily have to use any scripts however so don’t be afraid to try and get listed at many topsites and see what ones return the best results.
Topsites – Terms & Definitions:
Topsite List – A very basic type of website that generally appears to simply list a large number of links to other websites. The benefit is that the higher you get listed on the topsite the more traffic you will probably get and more sales. To get higher however you have to send more of your own traffic.
Rerank – Many topsites don’t rank in real time but will ‘rerank’ or sort the list according to hits in or productivity at a certain time each day.
Categories: Traffic Tags: topsites, traffic scripts
Link Exchange’s
The Basics Link Exchanges:
Once you have a website setup and running and hopefully listed on search engines and getting some traffic you might want to try and get even more traffic, or provide your surfers with links to other sites with relevant information. This is where “link exchanges” come into play. Simply you put up a link to another website and hopefully they reciprocate.
Benefits of exchanging links are that you can get traffic from other sites and most search engines take into account who is linking you to help rank you in the Search engine list so a site with more links coming into it from relevant sites will theoretically rank higher than one that does not get many other sites linking to it.
To start out you might just manually add links and hardcode them into your website. However depending on the type of site you have and the number of links you list you might want to consider investing a in a script that helps to manage the links. Scripts vary in complexity from the simplest that will list links in different orders and check to be sure the sites are returning a link to your site to more complex scripts that can automatically add new links, check validity, rank by any number of criteria, and more. However when using scripts to list links it may not be ‘search engine friendly’ so that needs to be considered.
Link Exchange – Terms & Definitions:
Link Exchange – Concept that you will place a link on your site to someone else’s site and they will reciprocate and link back to your own creating a back and forth flow of traffic and possible search engine benefits.
Hard links – Term describes a link that is hard coded (or appears static to search engines), mostly used in relation to building search engine popularity.
LE scripts- Scripts help to automate link exchanges by allowing people to submit their own links, check to ensure they are linking your site and rank the list of links.
A-B-C – Link exchange in which you link site A to site B and site C links back to you thereby making it appear to search engines that you have incoming links that are not reciprocated which in current theory might help your SE rankings.
Categories: Traffic Tags: hard links, link exchange, link exchange scripts
Search Engine Optimization
The Basics of SEO (search engine optimization):
SEO is a much debated concept concerning how best to optimize your website to get listed in search engines. Of course getting listed in search engines is one of if not THE most important traffic source for most sites to being SEO is important.
To optimize your site for search engines you need to learn how search engines work and what criteria they use to rank their listings. Google is the biggest search engine so it is important to try to build your site to rank well with them. However Google also tweaks its rankings regularly and nobody knows exactly what formula is used to rank the listings so beware of any SEO expert that says they can guarantee a listing because the rankings change constantly their technique might work for a few months and then end up getting you banned.
The best and easiest SEO tool is to simply build a quality website that surfers will want to visit filled with useful and relevant information. If your site is useful and interesting most likely the search engines will reward your efforts. It also helps to make sure your html code is ‘clean’ and easy to crawl by the search engines.
Search Engine Optimization – Terms & Definitions:
SEO – Abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization which is the theory that you can optimize a website for better rankings in the search engines.
Ä Rankings – Where your site is ranked in the search engine results (ie. in the top 10 is best).
Black/Gray/White Hat – These are terms to describe whether the techniques used to get higher rankings in search engines are looked at as ‘cheating’ by the search engines or simply quality improvements. (black is bad, white is good and Grey is in between). It is my opinion that it might not hurt to learn all types of techniques but realize that in the end it is best not to actually use the ‘cheating’ technique because eventually you will be caught and your site will suffer.
Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Traffic Tags: marketing, search engine optimization, seo, traffic, visitors