If you want your website or blog to get good traffic, you need to apply some Search Engine Optimization tricks to entice the search engine spiders to visit your site and rank it highly in the results pages.
Many people avoid using SEO techniques because they think SEO is complicated and difficult. SEO can be complicated and is often best left to professionals. However, you can take a few simple steps to greatly increase traffic toyour site.
The first step in optimization is keyword research. Keyword research is an easy process, although it can be a bit time consuming. Thanks to several online tools like Wordtracker or the Google Keyword tool, you can find keywords yourself and begin using them inyour site content. Start by typing in a word or short phrase that best describes your business service or features. If you are selling auto parts, for example, type in “auto parts” and let the keyword tool go to work. It will show you how often the word is searched for on a regular basis. It will also provide a list of similar keywords used in website searches.
The next step in choosing keywords to optimize your site is to choose the top five or so keywords and run a Google search on them to determine how much competition there is for each one. If a keyword is searched for 1,000 times a day, but there are 2,000,000 websites in the search engine results for that particular word, you may want to consider a different keyword without quite so much competition. By creating more precise keyword phrases, you can whittle down the search competition.
Once you have your list narrowed down to about five keywords, it is time to start using them strategically on your website or blog. For instance, an ideal use of a keyword is in your domain name, but many businesses have already established a domain name and cannot easily change it. You do have other options to use your keywords There are several other places you can add your keywords to help optimizeyour website for the search engines.
The search engine spiders will check you title first, so use your keywords in your website title and page titles as often as you can. Headings and subheads are other great places for your keywords to be noticed when your site is scanned. Using keywords in these two places will increase your visibility in the search engine results. However, because the rules the search engines use to comb sites change on a very frequent basis, it can be difficult to keep up with these changes. For many business owners, hiring a company specializing in Search Engine Optimization is the best route to get their websites ranked quickly and frequently on the results pages of the popular search engines.
Debbie Dragon is a freelance writer providing articles for Trace Media – a New York seo company specializing in getting websites up, and making sure they perform to their full potential.
Edward Roberts Jr. is a owner of GlobeTourGuide, a tourist destinations blog who managed to appear his blog on first page of Google and Yahoo search.
How about you? How do you manage your website's traffic?
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Did you know that you can use your Youtube Videos as another way of gaining more traffic and promoting your website?
Yes! You can make use of your Youtube Videos as additional source of traffic and promoting your blog. It's very easy.
Here are some few Tips:
Traffic Killer # 1: Poor Title and Description
People use search engines to find a blog or website that can provide them the information they are looking for. For instance, I want to get more information about blogging so I opened Google and typed the word ‘blogging’ then hit enter. Google will return a list of blogs or websites that contain the information I am looking for. The list is made up of links to blogs and websites with their respective Titles and Descriptions. Google and other search engines are limited to the information that bloggers have provided about their blog’s title and description. Hence, ineffective titles and descriptions discourage searchers to click on it.
Titles and descriptions that you use on your blog should effectively describe the nature and content of your blog or website. Don’t use titles such as ‘My Blog’ or ‘My Weblog’ because people normally do not click on these links. If your blog is all about tips and guides for bloggers then use these words as your title and description. You should also take time to carefully research the most appropriate words that you should use in your title and description. It always has an impact on your blog.
The words EFFECTIVE and FREE are traffic magnets and people are usually driven to click on these links. The more technical issues on title and description using Meta tags and Title tags will be discussed in a separate article in the succeeding post.
Traffic Killer # 2: Begging for Traffic
Begging for traffic is a popular practice among bloggers especially those who are starting to blog and those who have difficulties attracting visitors. Out of desperation for traffic, they join forums and leave comments to other blogs begging for traffic. These are the words that they often use. ‘Pls. Pls. Pls. visit my blog’ or ‘Show some love, please visit my blog’. Instead of begging people to visit your blog, tell them what they’ll find on your blog and tell them what you have to offer.
What’s wrong with requesting people to visit your blog? Well, requesting people to check out your latest post is not wrong as long as you don’t sound begging and desperate. Otherwise, people will think that your blog sucks. Or that you’ve got lousy contents that’s why nobody wants to visit it. As a result, they’ll will not visit your blog. Give some dignity to your blog… don’t beg for visitors.
Traffic Killer # 3: Eye-Sore Layout
When someone visits your blog, it’s important to make your links to your other posts noticeable and attractive (internal links). This will motivate your visitors to stay longer into your blog and read more of your posts. It’s not enough to attract visitors to drop by your blog. What’s more important is to let them stay longer into your blog and read more about your posts. Most importantly, you should give them reasons or impetus to keep coming back and check your blog for updates.
I have come across several blogs that are difficult to navigate partly because of the absence of links to their other posts and partly because of its layout and color combination. I usually don’t stay longer than 1 minute to a blog that uses red as a background and green as the text color.
Here are some suggestions to increase the time spent by your visitors on your blog.
Firstly, you should have links to your other post from the homepage of your blog. It is advisable that you have an archive on your side bar to allow easier navigation. Or you can create links to your best posts and place it on your side bar. You can also include links to your other posts at the end of each of your articles. For navigation purposes, you may want to consider having a sitemap of your blog or website. This is friendly to both the search engines and your visitors.
Secondly, work out on improving your layout, color combination and your style. I advice you to get feedbacks from your friends. Invite them to check out your blog and navigate through your pages. Afterward, ask them about their experience. Ask them whether navigating through your pages was convenient and ask them what they think of your color combination, layout etc. The feedbacks you will get from them will be very useful.
Traffic Killer # 4: Low Quality or Bad Content
How does a blog increases traffic through its content? If someone who visits a blog with unique, informative and relevant content, they will most likely talk about it on their blog or create a link to it or will refer your blog to their friends. As the links to your blog increases or the information about your blog reaches more people, expect an increase in your traffic. Always remember that a low quality content is definitely a traffic killer. It does not only deprive you of more links but it will create a negative impression from your visitors discouraging them from revisiting your blog.
Another factor that makes your content unpleasant is when you copy posts from other blogs. Once your visitors learn that you plagiarize other blog’s content, they’ll lack confidence to your blog and will be discouraged to pay another visit. To avoid this traffic killer, do not plagiarize. Work hard to create quality content for your blog instead.
Traffic Killer # 5: Unmet Expectations
One of the most unpleasant practices of bloggers is to describe their blogs with exaggeration. (e.g. Visit this blog… it’s the best blog on earth, or XXX blog is the best blog that provides nothing but the best blogging resources) Using exaggerated words to describe your blog may attract people to visit it and may result to a spike in your traffic but will not be sustainable. The explanation to this is simple. Assuming that someone has visited your blog with high expectations because of the words you’ve used to describe it, but you failed to meet their expectations, your visitors will not pay another visit to your blog for sure.
In order to avoid unmet expectations which is one of the major traffic killers, never exaggerate your description. Use precise words instead.
Traffic Killer # 6: Negative or Bad Publicity
Publicity is a key element in becoming popular. Paris Hilton became popular after the publicity of the sex scandal she was involved at. Like Paris Hilton, we, bloggers should also be popular in order to drive more traffic into our blog. We can do this through good or positive publicity. Negative publicity, just like what happened to Paris Hilton will not last long. Besides, every time men think about her, they usually think about her sex scandal (well not really all men) which is not really a good thing to be remembered. Opps.. I hope I didn’t hurt any Paris Hilton fans here.
Negative publicity or bad publicity may or may not kill your traffic. Most of the time however, it works as a traffic killer. I have seen a lot of bloggers who go around checking other blogs but always leave a negative comment. I have also come across bloggers in forums who are very hostile with their feedbacks and comments. These things create a negative publicity of yourself and your blog. Earning a notorious reputation from your interaction with other bloggers will not help you. Try to be more friendly with the blogging community. Attempting to be the enemy of every blogger is not rewarding. What’s rewarding is when you befriend bloggers and appreciate the good things they contribute. Who knows, they might reciprocate this with a link to your blog.
Traffic Killer # 7: Too Much Adverts
I don’t think this traffic killer needs a lot of explanation. To put it simple. No one likes to visit a blog full of advertisements. These advertisements discourages your visitors to navigate through your other pages. What’s more, advertisements sometimes obfuscate your links to your other posts.
Advertisement is not bad only when it’s not too much.
Now your turn. What else do you think are the traffic killers that have been included in this post? I’m sure you’ve got something to share. Use the comment to include your ideas of ‘TRAFFIC KILLERS’. Thank you for your time.
Too often people spend time optimizing their own site’s internal SEO but ignore doing external SEO, aka link building. Most people who’ve learned a little SEO know about trying to get dofollow comments on other blogs and article marketing. Here are a few other tricks you can use to further expand your external SEO efforts.
There are many sites where you can build free blogs and static sites ranging from big names, like Squidoo and Blogger, to small private and semi-private WPMU and free webhost sites. How you populate them depends a lot on their level of moderation and their terms of service so make sure that you understand them ahead of time. For some sites, you can use content generated with tools like my own Blog Content Wizard or unaltered PLR articles. For others, you’ll need to have quality original content. Also bear in mind that the more obscure and less moderated a site is the more likely it is to be penalized by Google. The opposite is also true, Google is unlikely to deindex Blogger (which they own) or WordPress.com.
Another way to improve your external SEO is to analyze what other people are doing and figure out if you can use it as well. The first place to look is at your competitor’s sites, especially those that are outranking you. This will give you niche specific information that can be quite valuable. Another good place to look are sites related to Internet marketing product launches since the competition is always high there. Lastly, look at sites that rank well for highly competitive terms.
Now, let’s investigate these sites in SEO Elite or even with a free tool like the SEO Quake plugin for Firefox. What we’re wanting to discover is where the site in question got its links, especially it’s higher quality ones in terms of anchor text and PageRank. While you’ll see some obvious related sites, such as a flagship blog, you’ll often see other stuff. This might include blog comments, especially comments on high PR posts on dead blogs. You may also locate abandoned forums which are left unmoderated. You may find link and article directory sites that are easy to get listed in and produce good results. You can even find guest book pages from years ago that have left the door open. You might find other interesting locations where you can add a link yourself or that reveal more about how others get their links.
Also look at “Web 2.0″ locations they’re using, like those on free web hosts like Squidoo or bookmarking sites. Often people will setup a tiered approach where lesser sites link to a free host and the free host points to the primary site. Check the links on these sites as well to discover hidden linking resources.
Pretty soon you’ll have a good list of resources you can use for linking to your supporting sites and perhaps even your primary sites. One important thing to remember is that sometimes these links get abused and lose their link juice. Should you see a sudden drop in PageRank or search engine results placement then this is probably what has happened. Your defense against this is to build a large and varied promotional network for your sites so that if one part of the network is weakened, other areas can be used to pick up the slack.
When you find sites where you can promote your site, make sure that you promote them as well. How can you do that?
One of the easiest ways to do this is to use social bookmarking to promote pages that link to your pages. If you leave a comment on a blog, bookmark it with StumbleUpon or Digg. This will often bring appreciated traffic to a blog, especially to a blogger who’s concentrating mostly on social referral traffic. Also use Bookmarking Demon to bookmark the site to Scuttle and Pligg networks. Do BMD runs for other pages, like forum posts and such, that link to your site. The idea is to build a strong cluster of links that promote your site. Not only will you get more search traffic but you may also get decently targeted referral traffic as well.
Remember, the more you can do to promote sites that link to yours the better off your site will be.
Although a lot of bloggers and webmasters will argue that Alexa Traffic Ranking is not an accurate representation of your blog’s actual traffic rank, it’s still very important because most advertisers depend on it to measure the value of a blog. If you are one of those people interested in monetizing your blog, then you should work in improving your blog’s Alexa Traffic Rank.
There are three possibilities that might increase the number of Alexa users who visit your site.
First, you will want to see that your site is properly categorized in our Directory so it may be easily found by our users. The Directory (browse subjects) on www.alexa.com is a copy of the Open Directory (www.dmoz.org).
To add your site to the Open Directory, go to www.dmoz.org, find the category your site should be listed in, and click the “suggest URL” link at the top of the page. We highly recommend reading their submission guidelines first at:
Adding or changing your site through the Open Directory is the most efficient way to modify your listing, as the Open Directory is used on thousands of major sites across the web (like Google and Netscape).
Secondly, you can submit your site as a Related Link for sites with similar content. Go to http://info.alexa.com/data/details/editor?type=rl/ and enter the URL of the site whose related links you wish to be included in. Enter your email address and your URL in one of the empty boxes, and then press submit. These submissions are reviewed by an Alexa editor for relevance before appearing in the service (with our current load, approximately 8 weeks if approved). We do not guarantee that we will accept or display these submissions.
Finally, you may also want to promote the Alexa Toolbar to your users. If your regular users choose to download Alexa, that may lead to more Alexa visits and a higher ranking. You can learn more about this at:
http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/associatetoolbar.html/
Submitting your blog to the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) on the other hand which is used by Alexa will usually take sometime. Submitting your blog to the Open Directory Project does not only improve your Alexa Traffic Rank but it also improves your blog’s search engine ranking. I’ve made an article about how to improve your blog’s search engine ranking by submitting to the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) that you might be interested of. The post summarizes some of the key aspects of the submission process that you should know before attempting to submit your blog.
Click Here to Read More..
Traffic is one of the reasons that keeps bloggers motivated. Traffic is so valuable that it could mean your blog's failure without it. For those who have just started blogging, building traffic is the second priority next to building great contents. But how exactly can a beginner generate traffic to his or her blog?
There are three possible sources of traffic for any blogs namely; search engines, referrals from other websites/blogs and or paid traffic. For beginners, which among the possible blog traffic sources is ideal? To answer this question, let's first have an overview of each traffic sources.
Traffic From Search Engines
Most of the traffic in the blogosphere is generated by search engines. Search engines like Google, Windows Live, Ask etc. are widely used by the netizens to search for specific information. Search engines when used refers websites or blogs that potentially contain the information being searched. Because of the significant roles of search engines in building traffic to a blog or website, search engine optimization became an important element in successful blogging.
Paid Traffic
For those who have the finance, paid traffic is a good and easy way to increase your blog's traffic. However, since it's paid, the cost increases depending on your traffic requirement. Adwords and Text Link Ads are some examples of companies that provides paid traffic services.
As beginners in blogging, I don't encourage you to jump into buying traffic yet. Since your blog is relatively new, I assume that your blog has few content. I suggest that you build content for your blog first before you avail of any paid traffic services. This will ensure that your visitors will have sufficient articles to read when they visit your blog.
Traffic From Referrals
As I've said it before on my previous post, traffic referral from other blogs or websites is your best shot if you have just started blogging.
In order to increase blog traffic from referrals, links to your blog from other blogs or website should be made available. There are several ways to do this. Here are some of my previous articles you can read that provides you with good information on building traffic to your blog.
1) Comment on Blogs
Look for large traffic Blogs in your niche, visit them and leave your comments on their blogs posts. You may use blog search engine like www.blogsearchengine.com, www.google.com/blogsearch and www.searchengineblog.com to find blogs in your niche.
2) Submit an Articles
Write articles that are related to your blog and submit them to popular article directories such as ezinearticles.com, Isnare.com, Articledashboard.com, Articlealley.com and goarticle.com. Quality articles may drive you a lot of free targeted traffic.
3) Participate in Community Forums
Use google to search for forums that are related to your blog. Look for forums that has over 10,000 members and read the rules of the forums to see whether you can promote your blogs and websites in your signature. Join forums that allow you to add a link to your blog in the signature and start participating in discussion. You can ask questions, answer other members questions and post your articles, ideas and thought in the forums.
4) Submit Your Blog to Directories
This isn't working to me but some bloggers claim that they gain a good amount of traffic from their listings in directories.
5) Post Often
You can lose traffic if you seldom update you blog, try to make it at least 5 posts per week. This not only will maintain your traffic but possibly attract more readers. Make sure you update your blog once in a while.
6) Write about Blogging
Write helpful and quality articles related to blogging can attract other bloggers link to your articles and gain may be truckload of free traffic.
7) Post Breaking News
If your found a breaking news of your niche very earlier, post it to your blog. It may give your blog's traffic a boost.
8) Social Bookmarking
Bookmark you blog posts in the large social bookmarking sites like Netscape.com, Digg.com, Simply and Reddit.com etc.
9) Run a Contest
You may start a contest on your blog. Think about the prizes that people really want. It will create a viral effect and bring in a new visitors.
10) On-page Optimization
Make sure your blog's title tag and description tag contain your targeted keywords. When you have posted plenty of quality blog post and done a lot of blog promotion, don't be surprise to see your blog ranks top 10 in Google and get free search engine traffic daily.
