Archive for November, 2010
3 Tips For Building Traffic To Your Website
Doing business on the Internet is not much different from doing business anywhere else. If you are active and creative you will get success. If you have these two qualities it would be wise to use them to build traffic to your website. Getting traffic is not as easy as you might think. Although millions of people use the Internet, there are also millions of offerings out there. If you want to get a share of the visitors you will really have to work hard. To get you started here are some techniques that you can use to build traffic and also improve the search engine ranking of your site.
1. The best way to build traffic is to build an interesting website!
This doesn’t mean that we subscribe to the “build it and they will come” philosophy. However if your website has many pages of information, then each one of those pages will be packed with words and phrases that people will find when they make searches. On the other hand if you have only published a “brochure site”, a website that is a mirror image of an offline introductory brochure about your company, then there will not be much “spider food” on your site. That is, there will not be much for search engines to put in their data base, and you will not get much traffic from search engine queries.
Another consequence in building an interesting site is that other sites will link to you, viewing your site as an important resource. In fact, this is what Google had in mind when it set up its current ranking system. A site that is informative and filled with useful information will be noted and other sites will link to it. Each of these links is viewed by Google as a “vote” for that site. Make your site interesting, and people will link to it without you even knowing about it.
In addition, never underestimate the importance of word-of-mouth. If your site is interesting people will tell their friends and they will check out your site. A content rich site is the first secret of building traffic.
2. Publish some of your information on other websites
This is one of the most effective ways to build traffic. If your site is full of useful material, then other people will also want to publish it on their websites. Webmasters are hungry for content to beef up their sites and their newsletters.
Here are a few places where you can offer your content (but make sure that you put your url and contact information on each article, this is how you actually get the traffic).
You can first submit your article to article directories such as:
ZapContent
http://www.zapcontent.com
EZinearticles.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
ArticleCity
http://www.articlecity.com/
Or, you can use an article submission service such as http://www.isnare.com
3. Improve your search engine ranking with on-page and off-page optimization
While good content is an essential part of any traffic building strategy. It also helps to take steps to improve your ranking in search engines. If your content is not optimized it will not get the exposure that it deserves.
You can improve your search engine ranking by placing your important key search terms in the title tag, the description tag, in your site’s headlines, and in link text on your web pages. These are the on-page factors of website optimization. If you do this successfully your site’s search engine ranking for a particular keyword or keyword phrase will improve.
It is also important to work on off-page factors that are related to search engine positioning. Your ranking is partly determined by how many other websites link to you. If you have published your material elsewhere, then you will get a good amount of important links. If not, you may have to launch a reciprocal links campaign or place your site in paid directories in order to increase the number of incoming links to your website.
Creativity combined with activity is a good recipe for traffic building. Build your site as best you can, and then spread the word about it. Use these three tips and you are sure to succeed.
3 Way Linking – The New Link Popularity Building Strategy
3 Way Links
There has been a lot of talk over the past few months, even more so with the latest Google update, about the value of linking. What types of links are better, which types are still seen as value added to a website. Well if the truth be told, the only people who can tell us are not saying anything. I am speaking of the engineers at Google and the other search engines, the very people who are the one who determine the value of all linking.
According to some people at the various search engine optimization companies, reciprocal links are no longer being considered when determining link popularity for a website. Just like so many of the other theories search engine optimization, outside of the engineering labs, no one really knows for certain. I have read some of the reports that have been issued on this topic and these reports are far from conclusive, offering little more than contradictory examples taken over several days of testing.
So aside from a wait and see what happens next stance what can we do? Rather than adopt a reactive position to this uncertainty I feel that it would be far better to move forward and be proactive by changing my linking strategies. As long as there is any kind of controversy regarding reciprocating links, there really isn’t much point in relying on them to help build link popularity.
Personally, I still place a value in reciprocating links as a valid means of trading traffic and will continue to utilize them however, as more and more misinformation gets spread over the Internet it will become increasingly more difficult to exchange links with quality sites. So what is a webmaster to do now that this style of linking seems to be on its way out? Simple – adapt or disappear off the search engine radar. Well Google’s radar anyway.
For my consultation clients I am going to suggest that they be extremely selective on who they link with now. Spend more time evaluating the potential linking partners. If the site measure up to their standards of web development and the theme of the linking site matches their site in some manner then, go ahead and trade links.
Before they trade links with any site they should make sure that the partner site is placing their link on a page that has some “on topic” content rather than a page that contains just random links. If possible only trade links with sites that employ some form of directory system so that all of the links contained on any given page share a similar theme. I will also be suggesting that they set up their own directory style system broken into categories and every page in each category should contain a topical block of text that ties all potential links together. Setting up their own system like this will make linking with their site more desirable.
Another strategy I will be advising my clients on is the use of 3 way links. For those of you who do not know what three way links are here is a brief, simplistic description: Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, Site C links to Site A. Pretty straight forward eh? The process is pretty straight forward but the application often is not. The only way three way links work is when all the parties involved are honest and are willing to maintain those links.
Recently I tested one of my sites and discovered that approximately 80% of the sites I traded links with were not honoring our agreement. Now I fully expected that there would be some shiftless webmasters out there who would be less than trustworthy but, I never expected the number to be so high.
Although reciprocating linking isn’t too difficult of a task it does require a certain amount of time and effort. To have some unscrupulous webmaster cheat you out of your back link in your reciprocated deal is bad enough but to have one do that to your site in a 3 way link deal is even worse.
You see a 3 way linking deal requires slightly more effort due to the necessity of documenting all of the information regarding this agreement. If you are going to go through all of that effort to set up a three way linking agreement you certainly do not want one of the partners to sour the deal by dropping one of the links without notifying any of the other partners.
The extra work required to establish a successful 3 way linking agreement isn’t too difficult, it is all about record keeping. After you have researched the two sites that you think would make good candidates for your three way link swap, you are going to need to contact them and invite them into the exchange. More than likely you are going to have to lay out the plan and explain to them why a 3 way link deal is good and make sure that they understand that the only way it works is if everybody involved is open, honest and up front about everything.
As part of the research for the 3 way trade you are going to want to make sure that all three sites are in some way related. Not necessarily in direct competition with each other but connected in some way; much like the way a restaurant site would be similar to a hotel site and the hotel site might be similar to a pub site. Pretty simple really as a hotel can contain both a pub or a restaurant, it isn’t too much of a stretch to think that these 3 service based businesses could be related somehow.
Once you have the three sites picked that you would like to trade links with make sure you research them thoroughly. The things you want to be checking for are;
Page Rank
IP
Quality
Age of the sites
Current link popularity
Page Rank
When checking Page Rank you are looking to make sure that everybody is of a similar PR. Don’t get greedy and automatically suggest that your site should be linked from the site with the highest PR. In fact it might be a good idea to suggest that the higher PR site should link to the lowest PR site. Doing this may make the deal seem a little sweeter.
IP
It would be best if all 3 sites were on different IP addresses. Sites that are all residing on the same IP may be misconstrued as being part of a link farm strategy. Why take the chance?
Quality
This one should be a no brainer. If the site isn’t of a quality that you would recommend to your friends or family to visit why would you want to risk the credibility of your site by suggesting that other people go to it? Rule of thumb here on quality is this; if you wouldn’t bookmark the site for yourself, don’t link to it.
Age of the Sites
The age of the site is important because of the alleged age delay sandbox effect in Google’s algorithms. If the site is too new then you may have to wait for the site to mature before any weight is given to the out going links from that site. You should try to make sure that the sites you include in your 3 way linking are at least 1 year old or more. No guarantees that sites over a year are going to be mature enough but at least the odds are better.
Current Link Popularity
The reason you will want to check out the current link popularity is more about the investigation into their linking history. Do they currently trade links with sites that may be considered as being from a bad neighborhood. Do they link to gambling, porn or FFA sites? If they do and they are not part of the gambling or porn world and your site isn’t either then DO NOT link to them.
Three ways linking in this manner revisits the days when linking was more natural. This type of linking will demonstrate to the search engines that you value your linking recommendations and therefore the search engines should value them as well. If the search engines trust your site to make these recommendations then there is no way that the applied due diligence will get you in trouble with the search engines.
3 Key Off-Page Search Engine Optimization Methods
On-page search engine optimization is definitely one of the key methods if a website owner would like to improve the results for his or her website’s searchability. However, on-page SEO often entails technical skills. Why? Not a lot of people are HTML enthusiasts. This is often what needs to be tweaked to do an excellent job in optimizing web pages.
What if a geek friend already did the on-page optimization and now you want to know how you can contribute to the “search engine goodness” of your website? Off-page optimization is the next step. And the results you will have to pine for are one-way backlinks. Why? This is how many of the major search engines such Google, Yahoo! and MSN rank websites. The more backlinks from relevant sites with good page rank, the merrier.
So how exactly do you gather backlinks? It’s not an easy task but it’s definitely less nerve-wracking than HTML if you are not the techie type. Here are some off-page SEO tips:
1. Article Marketing
Quality content has been discovered to be real king. Everyone is hungry for fresh and quality info and providing it will make backlinks go pouring in. It helps a lot to be a keen writer to be successful on this endeavor. Also, practise the proper way of using a resource box. It should only include a website that contains information relevant to the article you submit to article directories.
2. Forum Participation
Look for forums that are relevant to your website’s content and keep on sharing information that will be indispensable for the members of the forums. Your signature or that tag-along message at the last part of each of your posts is what will work for your off-page SEO campaign. Keep it simple and make sure that it conveys something about your website. Learn how to hyperlink to make it easy for the people who want to visit your site.
3. Blogging
Blogs or web logs are now the most popular weapons of SEO experts. Aside from being easy-to-update, they don’t require a too formal tone, which is what many readers are into. Informal dialog which can be accomplished through readers leaving comments and the blog author replying to the comments is what also keeps blogs fresh and search engine friendly. Maintaining a blog that’s again relevant to your website’s content will keep the search engines in touch with your site. Don’t forget to have a link on your main website from your blog.
The secret to be successful in carrying out these off-page SEO methods is to be consistent. Submitting quality articles to websites at least two to three times a week and regularly producing content for your personalized blog is a surefire way to make your website stand out. Forum participation should also be something done more frequently since it will not only help you up your website’s popularity with the search engines but also make you learn new stuff from other forum members’ participation. Also, if you discover that you don’t enjoy these stuff, there’s always a plan B – hire someone to do them for you!
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