Get Traffic To Your Website
Learn how to build a steady stream of traffic to your site.
Building a website is easy, but getting the people to go there is not. Search engine optimization is one of the best ways that can help you to get more traffic. But if you don’t know anything about it where do you start?
The good news is that you only need to know one thing, and that is incoming links. You can either buy them and you can create them. If you have a big budget then the buying option would be the perfect choice because it will save you time. However, if you are a small business owner, with a limited budget, then the second option would be more suitable for you.
In this video interview, SEO specialist Stephan Spencer outlines the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) for the do-it-yourselfer. In part 1, He covers both keyword research and content optimization.
Forums
Join popular forums, go into your forum profile and edit your signature
Make a signature that includes your affiliate link(s), or links to your own reviews
Make frequent relevant contributions - Don’t spam!
Depending on what you are promoting and the forums you are joining you will target direct sales or subaffiliates.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
You may easily generate incomes with affiliate programs and PPC like Google Adwords.
You may also loose a lot of money before making your first sale.
So be careful if you do use this way to drive traffic to your sales pages.
Learn how it works before!
Social Networking
Use social networking sites to promote your website. Don’t spam with affiliate links!
Social Bookmarking
Welcome to the Web 2.0 era!In order to make it easy for your readers to save and share your content you may add social bookmark links to your website.
Short tutorial on search engine optimization and social bookmarking.
Blogging
Create a free blog using a blogging platform such as Blogger.com
Write posts (reviews) of the products you are promoting
Include your affiliate links at the end of the reviews
Then ping your blog at a site such as Pingomatic.com
Your posts will be picked up quickly by search engines.
Get Some Quick Links From Trusted Directories like Google,Yahoo, Business.com, DMOZ.org, BOTW.org, etc.
Get Visitors on Google
Google uses spider technology to add sites to their database. What this means is that they have a spider-like robot which goes from website to website. You can submit your site by hand to Google here or you can wait for the Google spider to find your site.
How will it find your website? Since spiders go from site to site, if a link to your website appears on someone else's site then Googlebot (the name of the Google spider) will follow the link from their site to yours. The more links you have the higher your ranking and the more visitors you get.
Google gives more weight to links that are on a related topic to yours. So let's say that your site is about pets and you sell pet supplies. Any links from a dog-related directory or page will carry more link weight than a link from a site which sells music.
DMOZ - this is a human-edited directory and it's important because Google gets some of it's results from DMOZ and listings in DMOZ carry link weight with Google. It's getting less and less important but it's still worth trying to submit to it.
To submit to DMOZ, go here and select the category that best fits your website. Once you find the cateogry, click on the Add Url button and submit your website.
Do NOT submit more than once. That is super important. If you do, you will get banned for spamming and your site will never be listed. Make sure your site is ready. If it isn't 100% finished and looking as good as you can possibly make it then don't submit it. You only get one shot and you don't want to blow it.
Always make sure to submit in the right category. Do not put a lot of sales type language in the site description box. See what others in your category say and put that. Flowery sales description are edited out.
This video explains how to submit a website to DMOZ for the use of search engine optimization.
Get Visitors on Yahoo
Yahoo has its own directory that's different from what most people who go to Yahoo search on. It costs $299/year for a product or sales site to be listed in Yahoo's directory. The fee doesn't guarantee you a listing. The $299 just guarantees that they will consider listing your site.
They have started a program where you can pay them a fee to get listed and then a fee of .15 every time someone clicks on your link. I don't think this is a good deal for most webmasters. Personally, I don't list in Yahoo. I get in for free doing search engine optimization. Usually if you are in Google and have at least one other site linking to you, you will be added to Yahoo.
How to Submit to Yahoo
First, choose the appropriate category.
Go to Yahoo.com and click on the directory categories until you drill down to the appropriate one for your site.
If you are not sure if you are in the appropriate category, do a search for your major keywords and look at the web sites that come up. Click on the category and then scroll to the bottom of the page.
Remember if your site is commercial then you will be submitting to the Business & Economy or Shopping section. Don’t try to submit a commercial site to a noncommercial directory to avoid paying the fee. It won’t work.
Once you’ve gotten to the appropriate category, scroll down to the bottom of the page and choose "Suggest a Site". If you do not see this link then you have not drilled down deep enough into the sub categories.
If your site is commercial then you must use the Business Express submission that costs you $300/year, but if your site is noncommercial you can choose if you want to use the Business Express or Standard (free) submission.
What Is RSS
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.
RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.
Most popular sites news sites and blogs provide RSS feeds for you to subscribe to. All you need is a feed reader to view its contents. Feed readers come in all shapes and sizes these days. The Firefox browser has one built right into the Bookmarks feature.
You can also create feeds for your own website so your audience can subscribe to them. If you update your content frequently and promote the feed effectively, it can help drive more steady traffic to your website.
More Traffic
More Traffic For webmasters this is an excellent way to bring repeat traffic to your site. Think about it....every time a web surfer opens their RSS reader to get the headlines for all the sites they monitor, they'll also see your site's updates.
Instead of relying on them to bookmark your site and return at a later date, their RSS reader keeps your site fresh in their minds. So when they open their reader to check the headlines for CNN, Yahoo or any other feeds they subscribe to, they'll also get the latest updates from you!
Using an Email Autoresponder
Autoresponders are useful to webmasters in a few ways:
They can be used at your technical support email address to tell your users that you have received their message and will get back to them soon. Such messages are important because it reassures your customers that their support request has arrived at its destination and will be attended to when you are available.
It can be used to send prospective customers information like the price list of your products, your FAQ (frequently asked questions) and other fixed information. People emailing that address will automatically get that message in reply.
It can be used to send email course modules. For example, if you have a three week course, with course information or documents to be sent to your students once a week, you can simply request your students to send their addresses to your autoresponder. The autoresponder will then reply to your students with the course package at the scheduled times.
A variation of the above is used by some webmasters to sell their courses. They advertise a particular address by which customers can receive a free sample of their courses (or book). The autoresponder then sends (say) 3 chapters from the course or book to the customers over three successive days. On the fourth day, the message asks the customer to sign up for the rest of the paid course or book if they wish to continue. Since the customer has sampled three segments (or chapters) of the course or book, he/she is able to decide whether or not to continue. If the course or book was particularly good, the autoresponder segments can be an effective sales gimmick to draw the customer to buy that product.
Where to Get Autoresponders
If your autoresponder needs are simple, such as merely sending a single message reassuring your customers that you'll get back to them, you can use the free autoresponders that usually come as part of your web hosting package. The procedure to set up these autoresponders vary from web host to web host, but it is usually trivial, involving a visit to your web host's control panel to activate it.
Internal Links Improve Search Engine Ranking
Internal links play an important role in your onsite search engine optimization. How you link to other pages within your site helps search engines find pages on your site, index them, and rank them for specific keywords. In fact, when performing a check for a website’s backlinks, some of the strongest backlinks a site has come from internal links within the site to other pages of the site. If you doubt this, just look at Wikipedia. Almost every page on their website contains a plethora of internal links to other pages of the site, and they dominate the search engine results pages for many keyword searches.