Increase Website Traffic

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To increase website traffic, you need to let the search engines know that you exist by submitting your sitemap file to the major SE’s, like Google, Yahoo, Live Search (formerly MSN ) and Ask. This is not a big deal and don't pay any money for this service since you can do it for free through the Google Webmster site.

Once the SE’s have your sitemap file, they send “spiders” to check it out every time you make changes to your site. Google created the protocol that all the major search engines use for this function but sometimes it doesn’t work so well on Yahoo and Ask. Google webmaster tools has simple instructions on how to do it.

Keyword Research

Keyword research will help you choose the right keywords and phrases that will help the search engines know what your page is all about.

Make sure these keywords are sprinkled liberally throughout your page but don’t saturate your page with them because the search engines will think you’re “keyword stuffing” which is known as "black hat SEO". In fact, this is such an old and useless trick that i wouldn't be surprised if Google dropped your site if they catch you doing this, just to teach you a lesson.

Blog Marketing

Search engines love blogs. As a result, many people have adopted the strategy of blog marketing to increase website traffic. They just set up a blog on Blogger, Wordpress or any other number of hosting services and then link to their websites from their blog.

The benefit to blogging is that search engines index blogs quickly. However, blogs can be time-consuming because you have to update them frequently to keep your position. There are ways to automate this with some blog sites so it's not a big deal but it's something to consider when you use this strategy.

Blogs have become so effective that some internet marketers don't even bother with a web site; they just use their blog to promote their services and products.

Link Exchanges

Reciprocal link exchanges can be a good way to increase your page rank and site rank. Getting a link from an authority site (one that has high page rank) is great but just make sure that the site your linking from or linking to has valuable content that is useful to your visitor. In other words, it would be a bad idea to link to a site about cell phones if you have a site about basketball.

You also don’t want to link to a site that is your competitor, for obvious reasons.

Getting a one way link to your site from an authority site is what you want to concentrate on doing. It will increase your credibility with the search engines and your human visitors!

Traffic Exchanges

Traffic exchange sites can increase website traffic but are controversial because the quality of traffic they bring to your site is usually very low. Still, I believe that you should try everything once.

Traffic Swarm is one of the oldest and well-known traffic exchange sites. When you sign up, you'll have a start page with 5 or 6 website ads. You click on the ones that interest you and you get credits to run your own ad. Other people click on your ad, too.

The problem with using this type of traffic exchange to increase website traffic is that it's not targeted and in my experience, most of the sites were "Get Rich Quick" type of sites.

You have to stay on the site for at least 20 seconds so it's kind of a time-waster. Many of the sites are repeated on the same page so you could end up on the same page more than once.

Newsletters or "ezines"

Distributing your own online newsletter is a great way to get repeat visitors back to your site. It doesn’t have to be very long. Just little tidbits of information that will ultimately get your visitor to come back to your site. Offering a free newsletter is a tool for you to increase website traffic and "build your list" while you're at it. That's where the money is...the list. These are people who've "opted-in" to receive information from you because they trust you. They will listen to your recommendations when they are ready to buy.

There are lots of newsletter services that set up the sign up process for you by providing a form for you to put on your site. They will even provide templates you can use for the actual newsletter.

Social Media

This is a growing avenue that many internet marketers are using to increase website traffic. It includes MySpace, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and now Twitter among many others. It also includes social bookmarking and social news sites where you can "favorite" the stories and articles you think are interesting.

Social media revolves around establishing and being part of a community of like-minded people who are likely to visit the same sites you visit.

We've already established that the world wide web is a big place. Social media helps you navigate it when you are part of a community of people that can lead you to what you need and want to see on the internet.

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