Tips To Increase Traffic

Give visitors chance to comment

2008-10-20T11:58:00.000-07:00

It is always wise thing to give visitors chance to comment and share their opinions about the quality of your site or certain articles. Quality comments are also a good free content for your site but there is only one problem most visitors do not comment. Why is that I do not know, but in order to get as much as comments (free content) to your website you should be writing about interesting and popular, if possible controversial topics because these topics get many comments.

It is always good to encourage your visitors to ask you further questions related to your niche via comments, and if you're quick in answering them (of course quality answering) you'll get many returning visitors that will have very high opinion about both you and your site. Therefore always leave room for possible questions of your visitors and try to give them satisfying answer.

Sometimes is even good to make first comment by yourself, especially if you add certain controversy and flare to your comment, that should really break the ice, and ensure lots of other comments because many people will want to tell you how completely and utterly wrong you were by saying these things, while other will perhaps be even more radical than you. Comments are just like articles, they need to be interesting, popular, and controversial to make the difference and attract the visitors as well as the search engines.

Social bookmarking sites not good enough

2008-10-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

Social bookmarking sites can give sudden boost to your traffic but they are zero compared to organic traffic from search engines, because ranking high on search engines for certain keyword is what really counts here. Social bookmarking sites can give you traffic only when your article/news is popular but afterwards you're back to poor traffic because only constant traffic is traffic from search engines.

However social bookmarking sites are excellent if you want to get indexed very fast by search engines, and this is something these sites are really good at. Any other focus should really be turned into building keywords to ensure high ranking on search engines. If one of your articles get popular on social bookmarking sites that's OK but do not put as much emphasis to this as to search engines, and try to optimize site for search engines as good as possible.

Really quality sites have dominant percentage of visitors from organic traffic, and this is where you should put all efforts. Social bookmarking sites can be handy on the beginning when starting your site, but falter on the long run, where only search engines traffic makes the difference. After all traffic from search engines is traffic where people really want to know something about desired topic, while social bookmarking sites have only popular news that last one, two days the most.

Avoid too many links on your homepage

2008-10-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

One thing google doesn't like is huge number of backlinks on your homepage that can cost you better pagerank. There are some sites with literally hundreds of links on their homepage to sites they've done link exchange with, and google hates this kind of stuff. Write quality stuff and you'll get dozens of good backlinks for free that will be more appreciated by search engines that simple links exchange, especially if these exchange links aren't niche related.

Some links however (links from old pages with good pagerank of 6 or above that are niche related to your site) are worthy of link exchange even on your homepage, but again try to put less than 20 backlinks to your page. It is also good to put some unique description or some other text next to these links and not only web addresses. Google and other search engines appreciate uniqueness so try to work on that before anything else.

Beside not looking good from search engines' point of view sites with vast number of backlinks on homepage also look very ugly, amateur kind of like, usually with very poor design that drives away visitors, and reduces chance that you'll get significant number of returning visitors.

Dont expect good backlinks without lots of quality content

2008-10-14T02:41:00.000-07:00

Exchanging links with other sites is relatively easy thing to do, but getting really good backlink isn't that easy as most of these sites will want to see quality on your site before giving green light to exchanging links. Basically they'll have to recognize your quality and potential of your site before including your link to their list of respective sites. To become respective site you'll need to work hard on your site, updating it as much as possible with as much original and interesting content as possible.

Only once you become respectable try exchanging links with other quality sites, or otherwise don't expect their positive answer. These webmasters are not crazy to give away their hard earned respect to each one that asks them to, and of course they want to also profit from your site so do not expect one way benefits. In order to get some you need to give some, it is really a simple logic.

So before working hard on promotion work hard on your content, and do not expect miracles over night. Good traffic as all good things in life needs time, so make sure to stick to your plan, because beginnings are very difficult, and many people give up already in first month, after seeing number of five daily visitors. My best site took more than 3 months to reach 100 visitors per day, and now there are thousands of them each day. Patience is a virtue my friends.

Good and bad backlinks

2008-10-13T02:44:00.001-07:00

Many people today think how having as many backlinks as possible is sure thing to succeed in ranking well among search engines. This is only partially true. What makes difference are backlinks that are niche related, as older as possible, and with the big pagerank. For instance if you have site that is all about guitars, there is very little if any chance you will receive significant impact from backlink from a say seo techniques websites because these sites are not niche related, and have nothing in common. It could only lead you to a penalization by some search engines.

The only time these links can have serious impact to a quality seo building is if they are pr6 or higher sites, but you will get these backlinks only by some kind of miracles, because these sites usually care very much about their quality, including quality of backlinks.

Submitting sites to a web directories is good starting point but nothing more, except of course submitting to DMOZ or Yahoo directory that are the only two really worthy directories for your sites, but for one you need to wait for literally eternity and for other you need to pay significant amount of money to be included, so not really a excellent choice for your link building project.

The best thing is to start with a quality content, believe me quality content gets noticed very shortly, and ensures you number of quality backlinks as when you write quality stuff lots of people will use these articles (or part of these articles) on their sites giving more exposure to your site in general. This isn't fast moving method of link building but is the best one from search engines' point of view.

Exchanging links with niche related sites is also useful thing to do but not as useful as it is when your link is mentioned to some specific keyword combination next to some well written article, rather than just one of many links on some site. One thing is also very important to mention here: Avoid to many links on your homepage, and it would be good to write some kind of description, and not just having link on your site, because otherwise many links with no description can be treated like a spam by google and other search engines.

How long should my articles be?

2008-10-10T03:13:00.000-07:00

There is not exact answer to this question. Writing too short articles makes you look like amateur and writing extremely long ones may often turn visitor to other site, because most visitors are looking only some exact information, and are very lazy to read a lot, so they will probably lose their patience if you happened to create novels instead of articles.

The most important thing is to give your visitors an answer to their query, to enabling your visitors to find exactly what they are looking for. This is primary thing. Anything else they find interesting is bonus that will affect their general opinion about your site, that can help increase number of returning visitors. But the most important thing is to give them answer to their query, without it they won't spend too much time on your site/blog.

Title of your site must contain keywords

2008-10-10T03:02:00.000-07:00

It is very important for you to include some of your keywords(especially the most important into the name of your site and blog, and of course description of the site too, because these are the things that are vital to good rankings on search engines). For instance if you want to write about "importance of yahoo search engine", make sure to include the most important keywords into the name of your site, and especially into description of your site. For instance name of the site would be something like yahoosearchimportance.com, and quality description would be something like: Importance of yahoo search engine. Why is yahoo search engine so important?

This is one of the most important basis to increase ranking on search engines so make sure to do this one right. Title and description are what is you site/blog all about, starting points of your site, a guide what both visitors and search engines can expect to find on your site.

Title is extremely important - Choose it wisely

2008-10-10T02:48:00.000-07:00

Choosing right title is more than half job needed to rank high on search engines, the other part goes to remainder of the article that needs to be rich with your keywords but make sure not to put your keywords into each sentence because this both looks ugly as is considered nothing more than a spam. Good title is title you would write into search engine when looking for a certain query, which means that almost good titles are simple one, for instance person that looks for current gold value will in 99% write in search engine " current gold value".

But there is also pretty good possibility that there will be many other articles having exactly these words in their titles so getting to top of the search engine position will be difficult, and you will have to write mighty fine article, quality with plenty information to rank high. It is often wise not to write just title "current gold value", but to also add something else that separates your title ffrom all others, something that has good chance in attracting attention of surfers like for instance "Current gold value - Anything but gold at this time".

By doing something like that you're not only having all the right keywords that surfers look for but you also have something extra that will get their attention once they see your title in search results. Of course good title is only have job done, it is always more difficult to make quality article. But in any case do not make mistake with title because good chosen title really makes difference in search engine results.

Do not just copy/paste news for content

2008-10-10T02:21:00.000-07:00

I have seen so far a vast number of new blogs and sites that are doing that non reasonable copy/paste strategy, where these "bright" new webmasters harvest different news sites, coying latest news and headlines into their blogs and sites just to have some content. This is definitely not the way to succeed, in fact it is more likely that you will be the only visitor to your site after some time because google and other search engines will penalize you because of double content.

Lets look at it logically, how do you expect that someone will come to your site to listen the news when this can be done on old respectable news sites like CNN, that are in bookmarks of many surfers around the world. This strategy will make your site as nothing but a spam with double content that is no real value for your visitor. The other thing is taking some headlines and then make your comments in form of respectable and interesting article. This can make the difference but you have to pretty original and interesting to your visitors giving them some other interesting or even funny point of view that will attract their attention. If you can do that, then this a good idea for your site or blog, because you can find tons of new news every day, and who knows with time you can become respectable commentator wit lots of followers and visitors.

The other path you can choose is playing the opposite, namely writing complete opposite of certain headlines. For instance if the news is that "Roger Federer is the greatest player in tennis history" you can always write something like "Roger Federer is overrated", claiming that he for instance doesn't have anybody except Nadal to compete, and how Sampras in his best days would eat him for lunch. Lots of people will probably disagree with you but they will be curious to find out why you think differently, and if you really do your job well by writing interesting and well argumentated article, expect lot of comments, both positive, and negative, and what is more important more visitors, that will often return to your site to see what's new.

The most important thing here is to be creative, heck I think that anyone of us can express his/her opinion about some headline in a form of interesting article opened for discussion. Especially good ones are controversial topics that attract people much more than some other "regular" topics.

Content is the most important factor

2008-10-10T01:47:00.000-07:00

First rule of getting good quality traffic is good content. When I say good content I mean unique, quality content that will interest visitors to your site or blog. When speaking about the content one thing has to be said it isn't about the quantity but the quality of the content first. So make sure to write quality content, and avoid writing about the stuff that was written thousands of times already by thousands of other sites and blogs. Of course the real deal is combining quality content wit quantity meaning writing whole lot quality content but to get to that isn't easy thing to do, and takes a lot of hard work. The problem usually comes up when choosing the right idea, namely what to write about. What is this unique idea that will make the difference between you and millions other sites and blogs on the web?

Many people say best thing is to write about things you're good at since you know lot of them. This is good idea in some cases but definitely not in all cases. In case your knowledge is also the knowledge of many other webmasters that have been longer on the web than you, and know much more than you then you should be expecting some tough times ahead in attracting as many visitors as possible to your site. So knowing something good isn't exactly the ultimate solution for success of your blog or site, it depends how good other webmasters know your topic and how many of them are competing. Of course the more competitors the least likely you'll achieve success with your site. So knowing something isn't exactly achieving something, it can be helpful but it isn't guarantee for success.

Any topic, whether you know something or nothing about it can be a good topic. Of course you'll have to learn about this topic before starting writing about it, but it is exactly this learning procedures that can give you important guidelines what to write. When learning about some topic you spot the difference between something that is good explained and can be easy found on the web from something that needs a lot of searching and visiting lot of sites before figuring out what is this all about. These topics that seemed to be lacking enough answers are ideal for further study and make excellent writing choice for your blog, since there will be other people like you looking for clearer explanations, and voila here they are, on your page, after you gathered scrambled informations from many other sites.

When choosing the topic to write about make sure to be specific enough because general topics are something to be avoided unless you want to compete with pages like Wikipedia. The more specific the better, but don't cross the line by writing about something that interests only villagers of some hidden island on Caribbean. After all you want some respectable audience, don't you? After you got your idea check google and yahoo for results to see how many and who are your competitors (quality competitors or rookies like yourself), and whether you can produce that something extra that will make the difference between you and them and attract visitors to your site. If you can, go for it, and keep going forward.

Once you have at least 50 quality articles, you'll start to see difference in your traffic, and you'll finally see that your efforts weren't useless. The more unique quality articles, the more traffic, it's simple as that so make sure to think about the right idea as soon as possible and start working. The sooner you start the sooner you can expect success.