Posts Tagged ‘incresing website traffic’
Link Building Tips for Beginners
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
If you have a website, you’ll know that one of the most important aspects to improve your search engine rankings - and therefore increase your visitors and customers - is to have strong search engine optimization, or SEO. This will use keyword phrases and specialist marketing techniques to get your site higher up the search engine rankings. However, there’s another highly effective method, and it’s just as important - link building.
What is Link Building?
Just as the name suggests, link building allows you to build quality links into your website from other websites. This raises your profile because links show that people are visiting your site often - and the more visitors a site has, the higher up the search engine rankings it will go.
This is because Google and the other search engines believe that the more quality links a site has coming into it, the more useful the content of that site must be, so it places you higher up the rankings to encourage people to visit you. However, you can’t just use any links - indeed, if you have too many worthless links, you might end up being penalized by Google if they feel you’re trying to beat the system. So how do you link build and stay on the right side of the major search engines?
Some of the best ways to increase the amount of quality links to your website include:
- Request links from websites that complement your service or product. If you sell educational tools, ask universities and online colleges to link to you.
- Register your site with directories for incoming links.
- Offer reciprocal links. For each company that links to you, you’ll do the same for their company website.
- Write articles to put on your website, either as latest news or as expert tips, and submit them to article directories like Ezine.com or Quality Content. Not only is fresh, quality content great linkbait, you can create incoming links yourself by submitting your content to article sites. One thing to watch out for, however: If you want an article on your site to rank well, submitting it to article sites that have a higher Google PageRank (PR) than your site may hinder those efforts - the article site may rank higher for your article than your own site!
- Use press releases. These are becoming increasingly effective and important at driving traffic to your site - if you have a news story to tell, write a press release with a link back to your website, and then have it published on one of the numerous press release sites online, like Press Release PR or PRWeb.
- Buying links. While this strategy has come under fire in recent months and has even resulted in Google penalizing websites that buy and sell links for SEO (what has been known as the infamous “Google PR Smackdown”), you can still buy a few links here and there. Just don’t buy a lot at one time, and make sure the site where you’re buying a link is highly relevant to your site. Also, if you’re going to buy a link, make sure it’s on a page that has a Google PageRank (PR) of 5 or higher.
These are just some of the ways you can increase the links into your website. If you want, you can also ask friends and colleagues to link to you, if they have a blog or website of their own. As long as the website linking to you has some value, and isn’t regarded as a porn or gambling site, then you’ll soon see your ranking increase on the all-important major search engines.
Tags: boosting traffic, danny brown, E-Commerce and E-Business, generating website traffic, incresing website traffic, link building tips, Marketing
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Sources of Content for Your Website
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
You have a website and you’re generating some traffic and some interest, but you’re reading about how to improve traffic and have been given advice to put some keyword articles on your site. How hard can it be to write an article or two of 500 words? You can get that done in an evening.
Suddenly, before you know it, you meet with your advisor again and he/she asks about the keyword articles you have on your business plan. Oops, they weren’t that easy to get done. Your advisor mentions outsourcing or buying into a content service that will provide articles, which sounds like a good idea.
There are basically 3 ways to get content for your website. Write your own, have someone else write it for you, or buy software that will generate articles.
Article-Generating Software
Buying software that writes articles of quality is next to impossible. While there is software that will generate rewrites of articles, to get quality content you will need to do a considerable amount of editing. You will spend enough time that you may as well write your own articles instead.
Writing Your Own Articles
Writing your own material is a good idea if you like to write and enjoy the topics you have on your site. The chances are pretty good you like the topic, because you have a web site about that topic. If you are good at writing, you certainly can save yourself some money; but at what cost?
If you could spend the time creating more orders, more advertising revenue, or developing a new market wouldn’t that time be better spent on that than on writing content? The answer to that really depends on how much getting quality content costs, which brings us to point # 3.
Hiring Freelance Writers
There are several sites that help you find content for your web page. Two of the most popular are freelance sites Elance.com and Guru.com. On these sites, are able to list your content-writing project for free. You can list the topics, article titles if you wish, even the length and keywords to be used in the documents.
Qualified writers then bid on your project and usually attach writing samples for you to view to see their style. The process certainly isn’t perfect, but it is possible to get quality articles at a fair price.
If you are looking to increase your web traffic, you will want to get articles that are Search Engine Optimized (SEO), which means they use keywords and related words to trigger the search engines to bring up the site they refer to. For example, if you have a coffee business and want to increase your web traffic, you would want articles with the word coffee used about 12-15 times in a 100 word articles. Additionally, words such as espresso, coffee maker, creamer, sugar and other words related to coffee in the article would help to trigger the search engine.
Good quality content can be hard to find, so when you find a writer who is good make sure you pay a fair price, pay on time, and keep them happy. Good content will point search engines your way - resulting in more sales, more profits, and more good things for your business.
Tags: boosting traffic, E-Commerce and E-Business, incresing website traffic, larry Slusser, online content marketing, SEO tools
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Help Your Customers to Find You
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
The World Wide Web is filled with millions of websites from people all across the globe. This can be a bad thing for those who cannot weed through the crowd to get seen by customers. For those who can, however, it means millions in potential sales. With this many people and this much information, there is only one way to be found … through the search engines.
Basically, the websites on the first page of the search engine results will get seen by the most people, followed by the second page. Even fewer people venture to the third page and by the time you reach the tenth page, your potential viewers have trickled down to nearly none.
Unfortunately, some people are lucky if their website even makes it to the tenth page. So, how can a business overcome this, especially a small one? By having your website effectively optimized for search engines. This is known as search engine optimization, AKA SEO.
SEO is a science that many people have perfected, and it has taken time and dedication for them to do so. There are so many rules that go into the algorithms that Google, Yahoo, and other search engines use, that the laws of SEO are changing daily. SEO is more than choosing the right keywords, it also includes keyword density, keyword placements, article length … and that is just the beginning.
There are only ten spots on each search engine results page (or SERP), which means that your website needs to be at least the tenth best optimized website out there in order to make it to the first page. Many business owners do not have the time to dedicate to learning the constantly-changing rules of SEO, in order to keep their website visible by consumers; so, they deicide to leave this important task up to the experts.
An SEO/SEM firm has the talent and know-how necessary to keep you at the top of your competition and in the view if potential customers. Ten spots is not a lot when you think about the billions of websites out there. When you need to be the best, the only way to succeed is to rely on the experts.
You also have the help of a cornucopia of online resources - everything from e-books, to blogs, to SEO tools - to give you tips, tricks, and recommendations. Here are a few we recommend:
SEO Fast Start - offers a comprehensive free e-book that gives you the basics on getting started with SEO.
SEOBook - a blog, free tools, and a highly recommended, inexpensive e-book are available here.
SmallBusinessBrief - social bookmarking site for small businesses with tons of articles on search engine marketing.
Tags: attracting customers, draw in customers, E-Commerce and E-Business, incresing website traffic, Rebecca Button, SEO
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Getting Your Customers to Link to Your Website
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
What better way could there be to market your business then through your own customers? These are the people that already use your service or product and are happy or satisfied with it. By getting them to link to your site, it is almost like them telling a friend, "Hey, you have to check out this site!"
As you know, links are very important and valuable for many different reasons. For one, the more links there are back to your site from other websites or blogs, the better your site’s ranking on search engines. Another reason is that it gets your site and products or services under more people’s noses. The more quality, relevant exposure your site gets, the better chance you have of gaining new customers. Getting valuable customers to link to your site can be kind of difficult; however, it is possible. Here are some tips on asking customers to link to your site.
Offer Rewards
Doing something like a customer reward program is a great idea. This gives customers incentive to link to your site. This method is utilized by many businesses of many different kinds. It really can work wonders if you offer the right incentive. For example, you can offer a discount to each customer who provides a link to your site. It doesn’t have to be a large discount. Five to ten percent off the price of services or products is a great idea. Just make sure to set up a way for those customers to show you where they have placed your link.
Find Complementary Sites
If you notice that one or more of your customers has a business site that would be complementary to yours, send a personalized but short e-mail asking them to link to your site for a return link. For example, if you provide website design, and your customer provides web copy, they are complementary sites. This is a great idea; however, you should make sure that your customer is providing quality services to that any links you have coming from your site will always lead your customers to quality goods.
Start an Affiliate Program
This is sort of like offering rewards; however, you would track the sales you gain from a customer’s link and pay the customer a percentage of each sale. This is a great way to get customers to link to your site, and through this, they have a chance of purchasing your services or products at a reduced rate. This can really help get more customers to link to your site. Read more about this in our recent article, How to Start Your Own Affiliate Program and Promote It
Just Ask!
You can get a good number of customers to link to your site, simply by placing a polite offer on your site or in your email newsletter. You can say something as simple as, "Hey, if you love our products, link to us and give others the chance to experience us." This might seem like an obvious or simple way to ask, but it can be very effective.
For the most part, these tips will not cost you any additional money. Your customers can be a free source of valuable traffic and additional sales for your business - all you have to do is ask.
Tags: E-Commerce and E-Business, incresing website traffic, linking to your website, links, website
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