Devour The Web

To increase web site traffic, you first need determination, a goal, and a plan of action. Perserverance that comes through a grit your teeth kind of determination is an essential first step towards getting a flood of traffic to your website. Read on to discover how each element comes together to help drive traffic to your website.

Be determined to push through the pain

Learning anything new can be painful. It can also be a wonderful opportunity to explore a whole new world. How you choose to look at it can play a large role on how successful you ultimately become. As you increase web site traffic, a consistent application of your game plan will lead to success. Waiver in your determination to increase web site traffic and you take your eyes off your goal, and become sporadic in applying your action plan. This results in poor web site traffic results.

Have a goal, know where you want to go.

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If you are looking to increase the number of visitors to your website or increase your hits, I have a number of ideas that I hope will prove beneficial.

By far the best advice would be writing articles, just like the one you are reading.

If you search for:

The best way to promote your website
Stuttering and its effects

on Google and just look where these two articles are placed. As of July 2005 they were number one. This alone will create a good level of visitors to my websites as you are able to add a live link at the bottom of the article to your site.

When you have written an article you need to submit it to various article websites such as http://www.ezinearticles.com and just watch your hits increase.

To find other article websites you can search the internet, I also use a website called goarticles.

The other benefits are the fact that other webmasters or people are able to read your article and even use it on their websites, thus creating lots of additional backward links. These links are very important these days and in turn will increase PR ratings, which in turn will mean you are higher placed in search engines.

There’s no shortage of ways to spend money promoting your online shop - and certainly no shortage of people willing to take your money! However, search engines can be sending you qualified customers all day every day. How do you get a piece of this traffic? It’s estimated that 70% of people stop at the first 10 results in most search engines and over 90% don’t go beyond the first 30. If your shop isn’t in the top of the search results, you’re missing out. We’ll go through the five steps to getting you higher in the search engine rankings.

Choose the right keywords
You need to decide which search term(s) you want to be top for. This might not be as obvious as you think. Firstly, you need to know what people are (and aren’t) searching for. Being the number 1 result for a search term no one uses is no good. The Overture keyword selector tool can show you what people are searching for. Take some guesses as to what people are looking for, try them out and see what the tool says - you might be surprised! Do a Google search for a possible keyword. If, for example, you see 5,000,000 results returned you have to consider: can you beat 4,999,990 of them? You might be better off getting a number 1 position for a lesser keyword than a number 200 for a big one. Be careful not to be too ambitious - that keyword with the most traffic might be highly competitive in the search engines. If you are competing against a multi-million dollar online shop you’re unlikely to win.

There are multiple ways to drive traffic to your website. You can use pay per click, search engine optimization, email marketing, ezine advertising and many more.

One of the strategies that has been neglected in the past but is now taking more and more importance is how to build quality content and use it to get more traffic to your website.

If you have quality content, you can profit from that in several ways to increase your traffic. Here are 4 ways:

(1) Use content to attract the search engines

Search engines love good content and if your site has it, you can profit from that to gain exposure in them. How? You just need to optimize your article with proper relevant keyword phrases related to your content.

(2) Submit content to article directories or article banks

Some websites are in constant need for your valuable content. By submitting your content in the form of articles to the article directories, you increase your chances in getting your articles published on other websites. Many people go to these websites to look for articles which they can reprint for free in exchange for a link back to the author’s website. With this marketing strategy, you will increase your traffic because your author bylines at the bottom of your article will generate clicks to your website url.

The trick to making it REALLY big on the internet biz channel these days is to become an authority. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, if you are THE authority on it, you’ll be making money in no time!

Imagine it, you want to become involved in the world of selling candle wax. You’ve noticed that you and your friends all have a hard time buying candle wax online for decent prices or quality support, and you decide that you’ve had enough. You want to become the top authority in the world of candle wax selling!

Now that you’ve got your niche, you need to create an attractive and useful website. I know this is harder than I make it out to be, but I’m going to assume you can do this well enough. For these types of sites you almost have to have a message board / forum, tons of content, and fresh articles. You can get the articles from great sites such as the one you are on right now, or many others. The forums are easy to achieve via php boards, and the content is where you can put your own knowledge.

Webmasters have so much information available to them on the Internet about how to increase traffic to their web sites, but how do you keep visitors on the site when they get there? If you happen to use the articles format in order to provide interesting content for your readers, have you considered what they do when they finish reading one of your articles?

Actions the reader will take, will include: navigating to another part of the web site (if you are lucky and have a well designed site); typing another web site address into their browser; and, closing down their browser and doing something else ? perhaps resuming their work after a lunch break. If you are a webmaster, the first of these would obviously be your preferred outcome. But a reader who randomly navigates through your pages at speed, is not the ideal. How do you not only keep a reader on your site, but also keep them engaged with your articles and possibly the products you are offering, while they finish the second half of their lunchtime sandwich?

The future of online business rest in one word: traffic. No matter how great or sophisticated your website is, if nobody comes, your online business will fail.

To setup an online business and not get sales is a travesty. There is a lot of money to be made online. "Can you generate the hits to your site?" is the question entrepreneurs are asking and trying to answer.

Great Internet business come from everywhere: boardrooms or basements but it must be supported by loads of hits. Online is no difference from offline-it is all about customers hence you need a competitive advantage to succeed.

How does one become competitive? You need a position. This position is called the Unique Selling Proposition. It means the one thing your website stands for. It is the difference not the similarities with other websites.

Coca-Cola is known for the cola business. So, years ago, when it’s competitor Seven-up wants to advertise and promote itself, they called themselves "the uncola" and it immediately gave them positioning. Seven-up simply said, "Hey, we are not cola. We are the uncola."

To improve our website ranking and internet presence we need to exchange links with other websites. Some search engines won’t even spider websites that do not have links pointing to them. But to improve the page ranking you have to make sure that big majority of links you exchange are relevant to the content of your website. For example there is no need to exchange links with travel website if your website is about food. You can still have some links to the website of not relevant content, but you should try to limit them.

So why should I bother having any non-relevant links?
Well you need many links pointing to you to build a good internet presence. If you try tools such as Marketleap’s link popularity check which can give you a detailed report on number of links to your website found in all major search engines, you’ll see that quantity of links does matter in terms of internet presence.

Page ranking goes up with number of links, but if the liks come from the websites with relevant content that page rank goes up higher.

So how do I build a good, relevant link directory?
Building a link directory is relatively easy but unless your server supports server side programming like PHP or ASP, maintaining it can be very time consuming. If your server has PHP support there are many link exchange scripts can be downloaded for free. Try searching hotscripts.com or scripts.com.

Ideally you don’t want to be in the position of having to email other webmasters asking if they’re interested in reciprocal links. You want your website to be such that people will want to link to it, whether it be because of a cool feature, generous affiliate program, whatever. The problem is unless you have at least some sites linking to you you’re not going to get noticed.

In short, if you have a fairly new website you’re going to have to email other webmasters and ask if they’re interested in reciprocal linking. So how to you go about finding suitable websites?

Here’s one of the methods I use:

Let’s say I created a website about killer whales. The first thing I do is a google search on killer whales.

Next I take the first website that’s listed and do a google search on it’s url. So if the first website’s url is “www.allaboutkillerwhales.com” I would copy and paste that url into the google search box.

One of the nifty things about Google is that if you search on a url it’ll give you an option of finding pages that link to that url. So continuing the example the above the next thing I do is click on “Find web pages that link to www.allaboutkillerwhales.com.”

Recently I came across a web site with the heading “How to get a million visitors without spending a dime in advertising.” Unfortunately the web site didn’t actually tell me how I could do that - that information was only available through an eBook sold on the site. The price of the eBook was around $200USD. Now I live in New Zealand so $200USD is more like $400 and is kind of a bit beyond my budget, or more exactly what I’m willing to pay for an eBook I haven’t even seen.

But it got me thinking, is it really possible to get a million visitors without spending a dime in advertising? And in a short time too (around a month)?

The answer is yes. There are at least two ways.

The first way is to leverage spam with a two tier affiliate program. Basically what you do is send out spam to newsgroups and/or bought email addresses saying you have this great way to make money, just visit my web site (you’re targeting potential affiliates). On your web site you get people to join your two tier affiliate program. What this means is that as well as getting money for selling your product they also get money for getting other people to join your affiliate program. And you tell them to spam newsgroups and the like. Except you don’t put it quite that way. Maybe you sell them software that automates posting of messages on newsgroups or something like that. Anyway, you get the drift.