Everybody wants traffic generated to their website, but nobody wants
to pay their hard-earned money for it! Over the past seven years
I’ve been creating websites, I’ve found through trial and
error what makes or breaks a website for it’s visitors.
Just within the last few years however, I’ve been focused more on researching SEO
(Search Engine Optimization) and other techniques to gain website
visitors, and to make them stay. On top of the previous five years
experience, I’ve gained way too much knowledge to keep to myself!
So here are the basics, at least, of gaining and keeping website
traffic.
Find out your current page rank through Alexa.com. It’s not going to be pretty. You can use this tool however to track your progress over the next few months.
1) Optimize your website
If you’re interested in gaining website traffic at all, chances are you’ve heard this term before: SEO. SEO
stands for Search Engine Optimization, or optimizing your website to
rank highly in search engines. This is the absolute first step to
gaining website traffic, as it will help your potential visitors find
your website faster. Even for a complete startup website, that is not
linked with any others, you can gain targeted web traffic through just
search engines.
In order to optimize your website, include meta tags with
useful keywords and description, a site-map, write effective web
content, and have plenty of web content for the search engines to crawl.
There are plenty of meta tag generators if you do a quick search, or
you can research how to make your own. Same goes with the site-map.
Do you’re research and learn how to write quality website
content. Search engines crawl through your web pages, so if you use
your keywords within your content enough, visitors will find your
website faster. You can’t overdo this though, as your text may
start to sound unnatural. Practice and research is the key to writing
good content search engines will find.
2) Submit to search engines
After you’re site is well-enough optimized for search engines to
crawl, submit them to search engines. Submit to Yahoo and Google for sure, and then move onto others like MSN, Ask.com, etc.
Wait a few days and you’re website should be crawled. It
won’t show up on top quite yet, but search for it’s exact
name to see if it’s there at all. (eg. If you submit Webitect.net, search ‘Webitect’ or ‘Webitect.net’ directly to see if it shows up)
After you’re website is submitted and successfully showing up in search engines, check your Alexa rank again, and see how much your web site’s improved.
3) Submit to web directories
A basic rule of SEO
and gaining web traffic is to have websites link back to you. The more
that do, the higher your ranking on web searches. In addition, more
people click on your link if they see it listed somewhere. There are
two kinds of links to your website: back-links and
link-exchanges.Back-links are links that link to you, but you
don’t link back. Link-exchanges are when there is a mutual
agreement between the two web owners where they link to your website,
and you do the same for them. Both are valueable for search engine rank improvement, but back-links are much better.
So web directories are a way to get both of these kinds of links.
For the bigger directories, you may not have to give them a link back.
Don’t if you don’t have to. This will provide you with
aback-link from a well-known site, which will up your rank a lot.
Submit to as many directories that are relative to your website, but
most importantly, submit to DMOZ.org. This is the largest directory on the Internet today.
Wait a few days to be accepted into these web directories. Then, check to see if your Alexa rank has improved.
4) Find Link-Exchanges
So you’ve found the free back-links, now it’s time to move
onto link-exchanges. Most websites that are relevant to yours would be
happy to do a link exchange. Some however, may reject you because your
not high up in the search engines quite yet. Find websites that have
about the same or less visitors than you.
You can find other web owners in web forums, directories, etc. This
requires some direct contact, so be friendly! Be sure to find related
websites to your own.
5) Submit your content
Submit your content to websites like Digg.com, Helium, and AssociatedContent.
There are plenty of other websites that will let you post your content
as well. By doing this, you can provide a link back to your site for
each article you post on each website. If you post just 5 articles on 3
websites like this, that will give you 15 back-links. Furthermore, some
websites like this allow their visitors to put your content on their
website, with a link back to your website. Even more back-links.
6) Make your visitors link back to you
Create your own web directory, make a contest, or offer some other kind
of interactivity that will require your visitors to link back to you if
they participate. Moreback-links/link-exchanges and more traffic for
you.
Once more, check Alexa for your page
rank. I have yet to use all of these steps for my startup website, and
I’ve already increased my page rank by more than 10,000. These
tips should give you a healthy start as well. Use this as a base, and
then keep growing your web traffic by getting more links in to your
site, and adding more useful content that visitors will want to come
back to, and link to! Nobody should ever have to pay for website
traffic!
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