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What is traffic and why do you want it?

Well, traffic is the people that visit your website. The more people that visit your website, the better. If you are selling or promoting a product, you always want targeted traffic. This traffic could be converted into customers.

If you have a personal website or blog that you like to share things on, then you want to get in front of as many people as possible. In any case, more traffic is never a bad thing.

How does traffic work?

Traffic can come from a variety of sources. Anywhere you can promote your website, there is potential traffic available. There are typically two types of traffic, however. Traffic that affects search engines and traffic that does not. Both are useful, but depending on your goals, one method could be better than the other.

Google for example, uses a system called “nofollow.” If the links you are creating around the web are nofollow, then they will not affect the rankings on some search engines. If the links you are creating are “dofollow,” then they will affect the rankings on Google and other search engines. Generating these “dofollow” links create what we call backlinks. The more quality backlinks that you create to your website, the better you will rank. Backlinks are only useful if you use them correctly and responsibly, though. This is one of the common methods for Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

This article series will focus on both methods for building traffic.

Optimizing your website

On your actual website, you want it to be optimized for the search engines. We won’t spend too much time on this, but we’ll discuss some of the essentials. Firstly, you want to use standard compliant code. An example of using compliant code is keeping your html and css separate. Also, you should create a sitemap so that your content is easily indexable by the search engines. Another thing to look into is the robots exclusion standard. One of the most important aspects of optimizing your website is creating good titles and links. You want both your page title and links to be easily read by search engines and humans. For more on this, check out the Wikipedia entry on “permalinks.”

More information on optimizing your website can easily be found on Google. Try searching for “search engine optimization.”

Content Management Systems, such as the popular Wordpress, have plug-ins available to make this much easier. That is why many people prefer blogs, because they are typically liked by the search engines and easy to work with. We will talk about why blogs typically get good rankings later on in the ebook.

Optimizing your links on other websites

Remember backlinks? An important part in making backlinks work for you is creating them correctly. When you leave a link on another site, you need to pay attention to what is called the anchor text. The anchor text of a link is just as important as the permalink, as they are easily indexed by the search engines. Your anchor text should include your keywords. For example, the words someone would type into Google to find your website. The same is true for blog posts, your anchor text should include the title of the blog post.

Using Keywords Effectively

Now that we know how links use keywords, let’s talk about the article itself. When you write an article, you want to use keywords. The better keywords that you use the better chance that your target audience will find your website. Write naturally and descriptively and the keywords should flow by themselves. Before you can do this however, you need to find a good keyword domain name related to your website.

Putting everything that we have learned so far together

Now we know how to effectively setup our website for traffic. We also now how to promote our website through links on other websites. The main section of this article is coming up, which is where to promote. I cannot tell you how many times I have had people ask me how to get more visitors to their website. What we have just learned is the very first step to building traffic and the most important. Now that we know how, we are ready to learn where to go to generate this traffic!

Are you looking for ways to promote your Web site? The more targeted traffic you get, the more sales you will make. Let’s look at five quick and easy ways to get traffic and rankings.

1. Pay Attention to Basics: Your Pages’ Titles and Descriptions — They’re Free Advertising

Google and the other search engines will advertise your site for free for you, using precisely the keywords and descriptions you want. Take advantage of that free largesse.

Here’s how. Look at your site’s home page in any browser. What do you see at the very top of the browser window? If you see “Home” you need to act.

Fix the “keyword” and “description” meta tags on every page of your site. Remember, when people are searching online, your site gets advertised for free by appearing in the search engine results pages.

2. Get Links, but Ensure They’re Relevant

Without links, the Web wouldn’t exist. All other things being equal, a site with many links will be ranked more highly than sites with few links. Get relevant links to your site. There are many ways to do this.

3. Get Into Google News

Want your site to appear in Google News? Here’s how: write a press release, and post it on one of the commercial press release sites. In long term traffic boosts, and ranking boosts, this will be the best money you’ll ever spend.

4. Create and Promote Your Blog to Drag Your Site Into the Rankings

Do you have a blog? Create a blog for your site. The search engines love blogs, and your blog can drag the rest of your site into the search engine rankings. Pay attention to the keywords you use in your blog; use the keywords for which you want to be ranked, and link to the rest of your site with those keywords.

5. Advertise Frugally: Use Pay Per Click (PPC) to Get an Instant Flow of Traffic

The fastest way to get good traffic is to advertise. However, be frugal when you do this. Bid only on the keywords which are directly relevant to your site’s offerings. Ensure that your keywords are “long tail” — avoid competitive keywords.

There are many things a person can do to achieve website traffic, but the two most simple, and high-traffic generating methods are building backlinks, and creating precise keyword, or SEO content, related to your site.

Backlinks and good content go hand in hand when promoting a website. Backlinks though, are a great way to get free traffic to your site by optimizing your website so that it lists higher in search engine directories. Getting backlinks isn’t always as easy as you would think though. For the best results, you may need to connect with other top-rated webmasters related to your website’s subject, and then convince them to add content and links to your site. This is difficult because it’s hard to reach most webmasters and even harder to sell them the idea of your website yourself.

Many webmasters usually decide to just exchange links with other webmasters. This is usually accomplished by contacting another webmaster and offering to place their information, or backlinks, on your site for an exchange of yours on theirs, so it is possible.

You won’t ask how to promote your website any longer once you see the type of targeted traffic that hits your site after submitting articles to blogs, chat forums, and article directories. These articles could be SEO format or simply high keyword density work. Either way, it will get noticed by search engines, and therefore, rank you higher in the search-engine directories. The keywords you use need to be subject specific to your site and ones that are commonly used for searches but still unique. You can purchase keywords, or find online services that will assist you with them.

Have you heard of “Google Dance”? It is mainly for those who are concerned about their rankings on Google, as it refreshes the content for better SEO. It is an interesting theme that happens once in a month, that is, Google updates its entire index of web sites on a regular, ongoing, constant basis. Usually it’s done from about 20th to 28th of every month. Google exploits 9 data centers that will provide different results until the Google dance update completes its recalculations. Once the dance has been completed, the search engine results will show new listings and changes in ranking position.

What really happens is, Google sends out spiders to crawl the Internet, it begins to go through each individual site and updates the content on to Google.com. During the dance, SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) can fluctuate and websites often see a surprising rise or fall in rankings before returning back to normal. So people are known to get a little nervous or both if their site disappears from the index or slips in ranking.

As a result of updating process, old indexes do not simply yield to new indexes, but there is quite random movement in transition. It takes a couple of days for Google to complete its update. Especially during this period, both old and new indexes get their place on www.google.com, although alternatively or even in unpredictable ways before new indexes stabilize there for all to see.

There are many data centers that Google uses to spider across the world. Each center has a specific region it covers and all the information is gathered in aggregate and returned back to Google.com. It has 3 main WWW servers online, which are as follows:

WWW.google.com - main address, the true homepage of Google.

Other two servers are WWW2.google.com & WWW3.google.com which have been primarily instrumental in providing some answer to webmasters who are a little tentative with their future rankings.

When the mass update begins, the number of results on the three servers will be different for a while. Thus the results vary from server to server, they are said to be “dancing”, hence the name “Google Dance.”

Google Dance takes place every month and usually close to the end of the month. In order to know when the Google search engine spiders the pages of the web, there are various Google Dance tools available. You greatly benefit from this as it assists you to know when your site will rank in Google.

During the Dance, the Google spider will revisit every website, figure out how many sites link to it, and how valuable these links are. As Google is constantly crawling and updating the selected pages, their search results will vary slightly over the course of month. You can make sure all your web page does not go down for maintenance during Google’s Dancing period. It is just a right chance to make a better shot by fully optimizing your web sites, and to beat your competitors.

In today’s web 2.0 world you might look at your website and think it needs a complete overhaul because you are not receiving a lot of hits. You are probably thinking to yourself, “is my website technologically advanced enough to draw people to it?” In a nutshell I can answer simply, it does not matter.

It doesn’t matter because it is the content of the website that will get visitors to go there, tell their friends about it, and keep them coming back. Take the social network website MySpace. I would hardly call it a Mecca of technology. In fact compared to other social networks it doesn’t compare on many levels, however it ease of use and what it offers is what makes it the #1 social network on the Internet.

I won’t say that the advice I am about to give you will make you the next MySpace or even close to it, but if your website has something that people like they will go to it, tell their friends and keep going back.

Your website is about something. You could be selling a product, telling about a service that you offer or you could just be posting information about your favorite NFL football team. Whatever it is that makes you an expert on the subject. If you weren’t an expert you wouldn’t have a website for it.

You need to translate your expertise into written format and pass that knowledge along to others. For example, let’s say you are a professional interior painter. You have a website that tells about your services, costs and so on. You want more people to learn about your business and what you have to offer. Since you are a professional painter that means you are an expert. Therefore in order to draw people to your website you need to pass on some knowledge so they will take you seriously and visit.

People are always looking for tips on how to do something and as a professional painter you can give tips on what it takes to keep the walls cleaned how to repair small holes and so on. So our first step in getting people to your website is to write informational and education articles about your expertise. Your articles should be 400 to 700 words in length and should be written in such a way that the reader will take away from it ideas and solutions (exactly like what this article is doing for you).

Now that you have your article written, at the end of the article you need to add what is called a resource box. A resource box informs the reader as to who wrote the article and how you can get in touch with them should they have any further questions or interests. Your resource box would something like this, “Jane Doe has been a professional interior painter for 15 years. You can learn more about Jane at here website {insert your web address here}.” Do you see how this resource box informs the reader of who you are and how to get to your website?

The final step is to submit this article to what are called article directories. These article directories allow you to submit your article free of charge complete with your resource box. These directories receive tens of thousands of hits daily of people looking for good quality content and here you are giving it to them free of charge, aren’t you a nice person.

All you have to do from this point forward is repeat these steps on a daily basis, writing and submitting one article each day and you will be receiving thousands of daily hits to your website. Make sure you have on your home page an area where you can let visitors enter their email address to receive your newsletter even if you don’t have one yet. It would be a waste to get all of these visitors to your website and have nothing to show for it.

Once they land on your site how long do your website visitors stay there? Here are eight things you can do to increase the amount of time people spend on your site.

Getting visitors to your website is only half of the battle. The other half is getting them to stay long enough to complete a positive action. The more positive responses you get from your website visitors the better your Internet business will do.

Do you use any type of site statistic tracking on your site? Google Analytics is very good and can tell you how long a website visitor is staying on your site.

Let’s talk about what a positive response is before we get to ways to increase how long visitors stay there. Since we know that everyone who comes to your website is going to leave you want to get them to do something positive before they do.

Examples of a positive response would be subscribing to your newsletter, clicking on a pay per click ad, filling out a lead form, bookmarking your site, subscribing to your RSS feed if you have a blog, going to another page on your site, buying something, contacting you by email for more information, and so on.

These are all things that someone could do while they’re on your site that would be considered a positive response. This also increases the amount of time that they spend on your site.

Okay back to the 8 ways to increase how long they stay.

1. Offer only fresh content. If your content is unique and interesting a person will spend more time reading it. Using private label right content is generally not the best way to do this because your visitors may already be familiar with it having seen it on someone else’s site.

2. Make your site interesting by adding video, audio, graphics, and so on to liven it up a little bit. Understanding how social media works is a very good way to come up with ideas to make your site more interesting.

3. Remind your visitors they can print out content on your website. While it’s printing it gives them an opportunity to look at other things on your site.

4. Encourage visitors to participate in a survey in exchange for a free gift. Once they have filled out the survey then refer them to a nether page on your site where they can get their freebie.

5. As opposed to sending your visitors to affiliate webpages, create a file with a redirect name to another page of your own. You will get credit for another page view and the time a person spends on your site will increase.

6. Pay attention to how fast your site loads. Today people do not have a lot of time to wait for slow loading Web pages. If you have slow loading pages you need to change that.

7. Be sure that you have a professional website. This includes the text that you are using on your pages. Your pages should be easy to read and your site should be easy to get around it.

8. Brand yourself in every way so that as a visitor goes from one page to the next they always feel like they are still on your site. This includes having the same background color for every page including your blog. Your header should be the same on every page, and any logos should be consistent as well.

These are 8 ways increase how long a visitor stays on your site. By keeping your visitors around longer you increase the odds of having a positive response from more of them.

An Internet marketer’s main goal is to get their website high enough into the search engines to get more traffic and more sales. They achieve this by getting high quality backlinks to their website which can give their website a good boost. You probably have heard of article marketing, blog commenting, and Squidoo to promote your website. These are good ways to promote your site but they are not the only ways to promote your websites. I will show you five new ways that you probably have never heard of to get your website even higher in the search engines.

One way to get a high quality backlink is to submit your website to Netscape. Netscape has a pr of 9 which means this site holds a lot of strength in the search engines. Putting your link here will show your website to be very important as well. You will have to write a good article that is relevant to your website and it must be good quality and not spam. If its not good enough they will remove your link or people who visit the website have the power to remove your article as well. So make sure that you write some good material about your website to make sure it sticks.

You can also submit a press release to prweb.com. Prweb is a press release website that you can submit your own press release about your website. It is also a powerful website and is respected by the search engines. Just like Netscape you must submit good quality press releases and meet the requirements of the website. Every time you add something to your website or make alterations to it you could submit a press release and talk about your website. This is a really great way to get a quick high quality backlink to your website. I would suggest to try it and see if helps your website get higher in the search engines.

Submitting your website to directories is also a good way to get some high quality backlinks. This doesn’t work as good as it did in the early days of the internet, but it still is a great way to get some links to your website. There are a couple of things you could do. You can submit to relevant directories or you can submit your site to more powerful directories such as Dmoz or Yahoo etc. Dmoz is a directory site which has hundreds of websites all in different categories which makes it easier for people or search engines to find your website. You could also search in Google for relevant directories. If your website was about finance you could type this into the Google search bar: “finance add URL”. By typing this in you could find some directories where you could submit your website and get a good backlink to your website. You want to avoid directories that make you pay for submitting your website. Whenever you submit to directories there is no guarantee that your website will be added to their directory whether you pay for it or not.

These were just three ways to get some high quality backlinks to your websites. High quality backlinks will last for a long time and your website will remain high in the search engines for a long time. If you do what I recommend and follow my ideas you can begin to see your website get a boost up the search engine ranks.

It’s easy for a website to get lost among the literally millions of sites that exist. Many website owners are individuals without a marketing or advertising budget. There are, however, a number of ways to market your website or blog for free.

There are ways to jumpstart your traffic. Once a site is published getting the word out is critical to attracting visitors. One of the first things many site owners will do is write up and submit a press release. A Google search for “free press releases” at the time of this writing has more than twenty million results. Now more than likely there aren’t that many companies providing that service but there are quite a few that do. Free press releases are also great when you roll out a new product, provide a new service or make major changes to your site.

Forums, social networking sites and other online communities are another great way to get the word out. However, if you join a community or post in discussion forums, be sure that the site topic is related to yours. That way you’re with people already interested in your site’s product or service. If you make intelligent posts you can display your knowledge and expertise and build a positive reputation for your company. Social bookmarking sites are online community in which members share their favorite websites and blogs as well as interesting or helpful news and information they may come across while online.

A “Sign Up For My Newsletter” box on your homepage allows you keep those visitors that sign up updated. If your newsletter is entertaining and informative you’ll get more sign ups and recommend it to other people. The more people who signs up for your newsletter, the more people there will be that will go to your site increasing your traffic.

Article directories allow writers to offer their articles to website owners and newsletter publishers. Writing articles is one of the most effective ways to promote your website. Writing articles relating to your website, service or product and submitting them for free to article directories is easy to do, particularly if you familiar with your product. Your articles will increase your web presence through backlinks which are located in a resource box at the end of the article. Also, submitting original, intelligent articles will increase your credibility within your field.

Concentrate on quality, well written content. Search engine results are based, at least in part, on keywords and keyword phrases that appear on a site. Its how a search engine determines what a site is about. It should provide certain requirements as well as great quality. Generally, internet users use search engines to find what they are looking for. With properly written content and keywords which are related to your site your chances of getting found by a search engine increase.

For those with limited marketing budgets, spending a little time getting your site noticed for free is the best option and is well worth the effort.

Your new website is up, but you are missing one important thing - customers. Yes, it’s very important to have customers or you will not be in business for very long. There are a few different ways to drive customers to your new website.

Using PPC to gain customers

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is a great way to get customers for your website. It is essentially a means of buying targeted traffic through sites like Google AdWords or Yahoo! Ads. Once again, if your a newbie and you can’t afford to gamble with your skills, this is not recommended as a first step. Although, if you can bankroll it, PPC traffic can drive many customers. You just have to make sure you can do it properly or you’ll lose your shirt trying to turn a profit.

Use an Autoresponder

Another way to get customers from your site is by using an autoresponder service like Aweber or GetResponse. This option allows you to place an opt-in box on your site. The advantage of this box is that it will gather emails address that you can legally broadcast to on a regular even daily basis. It allows you to send out regular email postings to keep them checking for your next interesting broadcast. This comes in handy when you have a new product you want to introduce or launch. Simply, email your list of subscribers and you will start seeing purchases. It’s that easy.

Bum Marketing

Article marketing or bum marketing is a great option if you can’t afford to buy traffic or pay for an auto-responder service. This option is perfect for newbies. It’s free and effective. Article marketing is simply the process of writing articles and distributing them to different article directories to gain backlinks. These backlinks will help you to get Google juice and rank higher on the search engines. If done right, you will receive a flood of traffic and even some customers.

Driving traffic to your site is a fine art and one that should not be taken lightly. If you feel that, with your skill set, you cannot undertake the task of driving traffic to your site, you might consider outsourcing the duties to a professional web design / marketing company. Many webmaster forums have experts who are willing to drive traffic to your site. So, now you have no excuses for a lack of customers. Start sending traffic to your new website!

Internet marketing depends on you bringing lots and lots of traffic to your websites. If you are to become an internet marketer you need to know how to get that traffic flowing to your sites. You can have the best looking website but not knowing how to promote your website you will not make the amount of money that you could potentially make. I will teach some powerful ways of getting good backlinks to your website and will dramatically increase your traffic to your websites.

One powerful promotion method is something called social networking. You probably have heard of MySpace and Facebook. These websites are what we call social networking sites. Here you can meet people and at the same time promote your websites and products. These websites have very high authority in the search engines and will be able to give your website a huge boost. All you need to do is sign up for a free account and start getting your website some high quality backlinks.

Another way to get some good link power to your website is to submit it to usfreeads.com. Usfreeads is a free advertising website where you can create an advertisement about your product and insert your link to get a quality backlink. Right now the search engines give much respect to links that come from usfreeads so a link here would be a great thing to have. There are other free advertising sites that you could use as well such as Craigslist where you create an advertisement and put your link in it for an instant high quality backlink to your site. These two sites are very powerful and can get you very high into the search engines and increase your traffic tremendously.

Having an affiliate program is an excellent way of creating much more traffic and many more sales for your product. An affiliate program is a way where people can sell your products for free and whenever they make a sale they get a commission for making a sale. You can set a program where people get at least a 50% commission for every sale they make for your product. This way you can get hundreds of people promoting your product and you will be making many sales and getting much more traffic as well. If you are selling a digital product the best thing to do is to sign up with Clickbank. Clickbank is an affiliate network that sells only digital products mostly ebooks and products you can download. Here thousands affiliates are looking for products to sell and would be very willing to sell your product and will bring you many more sales and traffic to your website.

There you have it; these are just some extra ways of promoting your website and getting instant high quality backlinks. Once you get these done they will stay in these websites for a long time and will bring high PR to your website for years to come. So start doing these promotion methods and begin to see more traffic and sales for your product.