5 Tips For Increased Website Traffic

There are lots of ways to get traffic to your
website however most people are interested in getting
the most traffic for the least amount of money,
preferably for free.

While it’s difficult to get anything for free nowadays
there are still a few good ways to help build your web
traffic and still pay nothing.

1. Build a second content-rich website.

Because content is king on the internet many have
adopted the idea of building a content-rich site in
addition to their original sales site.

If you set up your title, description and keyword
tags carefully and find a good balance for your keyword
saturation, you may be better able to achieve high search
engine rankings with a site that contains only good content
and information.

Once you have built your content-rich site you can then use
the content to point your viewers to your sales site.

2. Add an article page to your existing site.

By adding article pages to your web site you can
once again point your readers to your sales page.

For example, let’s say you have a website that sells
vitamins. Set up a few article pages that reference
vitamins such as a page on the benefits of vitamins,
how to take vitamins, the effects of vitamins, etc.
Allow each of the articles to reference links to your
sales page.

This can be a very effective sales tactic because you’ve
attracted the attention of someone interested in your
topic. If they read your article and like what they’ve
read they’re more apt to check out your links and you’ve
increased your chances of making a sale.

Also, with proper meta tags and keyword usage, an article
page is much more likely to make it to the top of a search
engine listing than a sales page.

3. Submit your articles

Any articles that you write should be submitted to as
many sites that accept articles as possible. This is
important because sites that accept and include your
articles in their article banks establish links for
you and you are not obligated to reciprocate.

4. Build your links through reciprocal linking

By establishing reciprocal links you are verifying to the
search engines that you have credibility. If high ranking
sites link to your site then the search engines
will find you worthy of high ranking as well.

Find sites that rank well and request a link exchange.
This can be done manually or you can purchase linking
programs that will automate this for you. Either way
spend a few weeks focusing on creating quality links
and you will soon see your link ratings go up as well.

5. Join and participate in online forums.

The internet is full of discussion forums that cover
hundreds of business and non-business topics.

Find a forum in your topic and look over the discussions.
Ask questions, contribute your expertise and get to
know some of the forum members. This is an excellent
opportunity for you to meet others and introduct your
website. It also helps build trust while helping you
learn how others have found success.

Elizabeth McGee has spent 20 years in the service and
support industry. She has moved her expertise to the
world wide web specializing in affiliate sales.
Elizabeth remains dedicated to helping businesses
find trusted tools, enhance customer service, build
confidence and increase sales. You can visit
Elizabeth’s sites at:
http://www.pro-marketing-online.com
http://www.homenotion.com

Using Ad Tracking Tools

You HAVE to know how well your ads are doing. You cannot just cast thousands of them into the wind and HOPE that maybe you will get the odd result. You must know where is good for your offer, which ads pull best, etc. You need to test and test some more.

Indiscriminate free advertising will not generate sufficient results for the amount of effort you’ll put in. It will get some results, but you’ll be working hard, not smart.

In order to not have to post ads 48 hours a day for 2 clicks in return, you must narrow it down by testing so that you can then spend your precious time concentrating on what works best.

So how do you test?

There’s lots of methods, but let me show you how to make use of some of the simplest online tracking tools for your URLs.

The first one I have been testing myself is the free service from LinkCounter.com http://www.linkcounter.com

Go there and set up a FREE account. You paste your “real” links (the web addresses you want people to actually go to) into their system and they give you a “new” link that you would publish in your ads. How easy can it get?

You can set up as many as you like and keep adding to them, as you wish. You only need one account to track multiple links, ads, websites, offers, affiliate schemes, whatever.

Every day, they send you a report by email that tells you how many clicks you got on each of the different links you set up.

Here’s an example from my report:

Link Title: EACZ Bravenet Classifieds Link URL: pub21.bravenet.com/classified/show.asp?usernum= 1800611284&cpv=1 Link : http://www.linkcounter.com/go.php?linkid=69653 Date: Clicks 2000-12-11 2

I gave it the title I wanted to see so that I could identify it. The Link URL: is the real one (online classifieds) and Link: is the one I publish, which is the one that 2 real live people actually clicked on that day. (Impressive eh?)

I can see several benefits and uses for this:

=> If you have a very long URL, it saves it getting chopped in half in a newsletter or any other email message as the original one in this example obviously would.

If it gets chopped, it won’t be “clickable”, which means to work someone would need to copy and paste it in bits into their browser. Yeah! You think so?

No-one bothers, because that takes too much effort. In reality, they will either click what comes in the first half ending up at the wrong place — usually the right place, but without your reference on, or more likely, they will just skip it altogether.

=> linkcounter.com is generic — it doesn’t identify your program so there is an element of “surprise” that will help you get the click. People don’t click if they think they’ve seen it before.

=> It’s cheat-proof. It is still a URL with a number on the end, but if anyone tries to take the numbers off this, they’ll just get an error or go to linkcounter. If they knock the numbers or reference off your affiliate URL, then they may still end up at the program, but you won’t earn the commission.

=> You will find out if anyone actually IS clicking!

Track a whole ad campaign

If you use different linkcounter links, for the same URL, but with different ads or for the same ads in different ezines, (give each one or “campaign” a title that you’ll remember), you’ll find out which ones work best so you know where to advertise again or if you should maybe “tweak” your ads for better results.

You can also use this on your website, but you don’t need to have one to use it. You can also enter an amount, say if you are in a program that pays you 10 cents per click and it will add them up so you can double-check this against your commission check.

This doesn’t mean you should NOT get your own website, domain and home on the web. If you have that already, then you can use this to see how many people are clicking away to certain links within your site, both internal or external. Your log files should tell you where people go internally, but if you don’t have them, here’s an alternative. Your log files don’t send you email each day as this does!

You’ll also find a similar concept at: http://www.roibot.com/

Or you can do your own ad tracking. At the most simple, give each campaign it’s own page with a (preferably invisible) counter on.

If you do have access to log files on your site, “key” your URLs with references of your choice so you can count the responses to each. Or set up different redirect pages for each ad to see which ones get hits. You can get the code for a redirect page, here: http://www.tucats-design.com/eacz/code.html

Just don’t leave it to chance, or you’ll spend more time chasing your own tail than actually making progress or PROFIT.

Reciprocal Links Exchange or Coming Back from Internet Marketing Ashes

Reciprocal links exchange isn’t new to the online market. I remember doing links exchange in late 90s and since that time reciprocal links have helped me a lot. But why some are getting top positions on search terms with reciprocal links, and others fall behind? Where is the line that separates winners and those who blame everything on the changing nature of search engines?

Sharing personal experience I can say that reciprocal links are one of the great inventions of the Internet. Links save tons of job for search engines. Imagine how much information search engines would need to index! They already pay much on all their huge databases, and indexing everything on site could double, triple their expenses on storing and processing all that info.

It is much easier for search engines to index a link only. Because links have title (or anchor) and this title can be analyzed for keyword to check the relevancy. Link has structure and keywords even in the name of link; link has a description. From links search engines can learn about the topic, the popularity of your web site and help to put your site to the proper niche in the eyes of search engines.

Now you see why search engines are destined to love links, reciprocal links including, and why link exchange remains a very important factor to get higher positions and receive free, targeted traffic from search engines.

Reciprocal Links - Play by The Rules of Search Engines.

Most of the problems with reciprocal links exchange emerge when site owners or webmasters start violating the rules of search engines. Let’s face it: if you want to get free, targeted traffic from search engines, you either play by their rules, or try to find traffic somewhere else.

The rules of search engines are very simple.

(1) Your web site must give value.

Don’t make a dummy site with pure directory, and Google listings, and maybe Google ads. This type of site gives no value: no useful info, no quality product or service - nothing. When the user of search engine finds such a web site on the search term, this can irritate greatly. Users report to search engine, human editor comes to the site, sees its ‘value’ and the site gets to black list.

I had a client who had some problems with IP being blocked by Google. When I came to his site - Oh my God - seems like everything that could be violated was violated. It is good that Google gets every site the chance to get back on board, if the violations are taken out.

(2) Reciprocal links exchange must be relevant.

If some years ago search engines wouldn’t go that far in indexing the relevancy of links, today the picture looks absolutely another way. It is easy to index the link and check if the description and title of link coincide with the topic and niche of web site.

Of course, as the owner of web site you have all rights to put any kind of links on your web site - it is your business. But since you want to rank top from reciprocal links exchange with search engines, forget about your ambitions. Pick only relevant web sites and do link exchange with them.

(3) Exchange reciprocal links with reputable web sites.

The hidden truth is that for Google it does not matter what Page Rank the page with your reciprocal link has. Or better say - even PR 0 links count. The more relevant links, the better for your site.

But surely having your reciprocal link on 5 pages with (for example) PR 6 helps you to get indexed very fast, without sandbox for 2+ months and other unnecessary pain.

That is why never lose a chance to do reciprocal links exchange with a page that has nice Google PR, this will add more value to your web site in the eyes of Google. And Google is still the top search engine.

A hint where you can find many web sites that are ready for link exchange and have pages with nice PR. Check the sites that have automatic reciprocal links exchange directories installed. Most of the pages in these directories have PR from 3 to 7. And it is so easy to automatically submit your reciprocal link to all of them.

Follow these guidelines and learn more from those who already succeeded. Be wise and reasonable with reciprocal links exchange, and this will give you tremendous fruits in the end.