Everyone that builds a site, no matter what the purpose of that site is, needs traffic. Traffic generation is one of the hardest parts of building a website. There is a lot of competition out there for almost any subject and you have thousands if not millions of competitors for that traffic. Search engines are the main vehicle that will deliver that traffic to you. One of the best ways to get Search engines like Google or Yahoo to visit your site is to submit your site to the various Social Networking sites like digg.com or StumbleUpon. Once you bookmark a particular page with one of these services you will usually receive one of the search engine spiders within a couple of hours. It does not mean the Search engine will actually load your site in their index, but they will definitely not index you if they never visit. For you to rank well in the search engines you need a decent amount of links coming into your site. Some links are better than others. An often over looked method of getting quality incoming links is to post on blogs that are hosted on .edu sites. Search engines are discounting the amount of relevance they give to blog comment links, but the power of a link from an .edu link is still relevant. Don’t spam the blogs you post links on but give the owner of that blog some useful content in the spirit of the web 2.0 craze of user submitted content. This will help entice the owner of the blog to actually allow you comment to be posted and the keywords around your post will help you in the search engines. You can also post on other relevant blogs about your site as you may get visitors from other blogs. There are many other methods for generating traffic which we will explore more later on.
One thing that a lot of people seem to look over is the effectiveness of your linking strategies . Study your audience. Don’t just pay attention to how many visitors you are getting, but also try to think of why the people are finding you and what they want. This means analyzing your logs. This is not a very glamorous task, but it absolutely has to be done for you to gain positions and focus your efforts on the correct actions. Look at the keywords your visitors are finding you by and look at the competitors who rank higher than you do. Try to figure out why the SE ranked them higher and then test different strategies to see if you can start to out-rank them.
Don’t’ result to black hat strategies to accomplish this, work on the white-hat techniques. If your competitor’s copy is better than your then tweak it, look for other keyword combinations that they are using which you may be able to utilize in your content. And the number on method for receiving targeted traffic for your website is to ensure you create quality content. Give people interesting content to read and they are more apt to link to your site which will insulate your traffic from fluctuations in the search engine’s code.
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