Building a beautiful website and publishing it online is a great achievement that makes anyone proud. It can be bright and shiny and a sight to see. But if you let it sit, it probably will get very few views and soon this new source of pride can become a source of frustration. All this work and no one comes to visit?
The prettiest, most well-designed website is just another lonely orphan without traffic. Traffic is what brings in the visitors. And even better than just bringing in viewers that might not be interested in buying what you are selling, your site needs targeted web site traffic.
Since the Internet is also known as 'the information highway', and information is made up of words - when you set up your website, you must go a step further and design it around keywords and keyword phrases.
One way to gain attention to your website is to write articles expanding upon these keywords and place them on the information highway.
Article Submissions Keyword rich articles submitted to article directories not only tell potential clients that you are there, but also these articles become available to be picked up by the search engines. This usually will get the attention of Google and your site should be indexed quickly with your set of keywords.
Submitting unique articles is an excellent way to increase your targeted traffic. Then you will attract only interested people to your website who will read and view your pages and be introduced to your product. This traffic is largely free in that the only cost to you is your time to research and write these submissions. And depending on the quality of the writing and the interest within the niche, this traffic should continue for some time after the original publication.
Linking
Article marketing has an added effect of adding links from the article directories to your website. These are called backlinks. In general the more you have the higher the site will be ranked and the more traffic it will receive from the search engines (as well as from the links themselves). There are other factors in the ranking of a website, but the number of links is a major part of the formula.
Article marketing has an added effect of adding links from the article directories to your website. These are called backlinks. In general the more you have the higher the site will be ranked and the more traffic it will receive from the search engines (as well as from the links themselves). There are other factors in the ranking of a website, but the number of links is a major part of the formula.
The quality of backlinks i.e. the page rank ( value from 1 to 10, 10 being the highest assigned by Google) of the linking sites carries a lot of weight. Links from educational institutions (.edu) and government agencies (.gov) are highly regarded.
How does one get these links?
Article directories help because they tend to be high page rank and links from them can carry some valuable 'link juice'. Joining and contributing in forums is an another method. A well-written comment in a high, page-rank forum will give your website a boost.
Article directories help because they tend to be high page rank and links from them can carry some valuable 'link juice'. Joining and contributing in forums is an another method. A well-written comment in a high, page-rank forum will give your website a boost.
Links from.edus and.govs
In some cases you can join forums at universities and at some government agencies and get link juice from them. These are highly respected backlinks.
In some cases you can join forums at universities and at some government agencies and get link juice from them. These are highly respected backlinks.
RSS Feeds RSS stands for 'real simple syndication' and is a means of telling many other websites that you have just made a post to your blog. This is quite easy to do if your website is a blog platform. Plug ins exist which will take your post and disseminate it to numerous RSS services which in turn will index it and may feed it to other sites.
It is like ringing a bell and announcing to the web that you have written some new information. The feed itself contains a few lines from the post that hopefully act like a teaser of article. Subscribers to the various RSS services or even to your website feed will now see that you have added something new and all they have to do is click on the feed and they can view the entire post. Hence, more targeted traffic comes to your site.
Web2.0 Properties Within the past 5 years many new websites have come online which allow users to develop and publish pages on them. These websites have become very popular and many have gained a lot of traffic and consequent high page ranks.
Setting up keyword relevant pages on Squidoo, HubPages, WetPaint and many others can help boost traffic to your website. These Web2.0 properties are high page rank (around 8) and links coming from them tend to bring a lot of link juice with them. Also you make yourself more visible on the web because you have other pages pertinent to your own website promoting your keywords even further.
Press Releases Informed articles about your site, released to certain news websites can have a very powerful effect on traffic. Here you are telling the information highway that you are there and this is what you do. This helps to make you an 'authority' in your niche.
Timing these press releases can be critical as well as the writing them. However, they are definitely worth the effort.
Submission to directories There are many directories on the web that collect data from websites and store the data. A few are quite prestigious. By filling out applications and submitting them to many directories, you make your website more visible to the web. When someone enters your keywords into a search engine - they have a much greater chance of coming across your website. Hence, another way to get targeted traffic.
Publishing a well-designed and information-packed website on the Internet is only the beginning. What is usually missing is sorely needed traffic. The webmaster has many techniques to attract targeted traffic. In this article I have presented a few: article submissions, getting backlinks, RSS feeds, Web2.0 properties, press releases, and directory submission.
These methods do work, but they take a lot of time and effort. Since there are only 24 hours in a day, many internet marketing tools have been developed to cut this work down to a small fraction of the time it would take to do all the work by hand.
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