Archive for July, 2008



The Importance of Website Traffic: Traffic Generation Techniques

Thursday 31 July 2008 @ 1:06 pm

by Eddie Watkins

Using different traffic generation techniques to attract website traffic is of the utmost importance to your online business success. Without attracting visitors to your website, the possiblities of becomming successful are nill.

Obtaining traffic is one of the main reasons for having a website. Let’s compare your website to a shoe store. In your shoe store you sell tennis shoes, loafers, pumps, flip flops and golf shoes. If no one comes into your store to purchase your array of products, your business will soon go down the tubes. Whatever medium you choose to use, you must advertise your business. Just as with your website, you must have visitors in order to thrive.

Without website traffic you may as well give up, as a shopping mall store would close its doors, so what can you do to attract the traffic that your survival depends upon? The answer to that question could fill a book - and a very large book! Much depends on how you look at it, but there are basically four different ways of directing traffic to your website:

1. Search engines 2. Online advertising 3. Offline advertising 4. Word of mouth, or buzz advertising.

There isn’t enough room here to discuss all of these, and you will likely be familiar with many of the more conventional traffic generation techniques, so let’s have a look at one or two of the less well known methods within each of these categories that can be used to attract website traffic to your site.

Search Engines

There is a difference between Search Engines and SEO, with SEO you will have to do a lot of reading, in order to get the process right. But you can use search engines, in order to get visitors to your website.

One is by the use of Smart Pages. These are pages on your website that the search engines spiders can find, but that your visitors never see. They are legal, but very borderline, and the way they work is that you generate dozens and more of web pages based on long tail keywords that have been used by people seeking the information on your website. You would normally use Smart page software to do this, and each page will be unique, without duplication.

When a person does a search using one of the search engines, and they use a certain keyword. The keyword that the individual is looking for has already been indexed with your page connected to that keyword. So you would think that the person would be directed to your indexed page. But they are directed to the landing page that the software has been programmed for. You can create as many of these smart pages as you like, and the visitor is sent to whatever page the software is programmed for.

That is just one of many techniques that can be used to direct search engine users to your website when they are seeking information with which you can provide them.

Advertising Online

There are many online advertising techniques that people use, including using blogs to advertise their URL and article marketing for the same purpose. Web2 sites have been used, but they are not very productive, but there are other options. You can get free links from your own Facebook page: for every website or blog you possess, and what about Twitter? You can advertise your website on your twitter posts. You can also use PPC, but not Adwords that can be expensive. Searchfeed offers good pay-per-click ads for 1 cent. If you use searchfeed, you can get by spending $25 a day, which equates to 2500 visitors to your website every day - for $25!

Classified Advertising

A lot of people forget about the power of classifed advertising. Putting a small ad in your local newspaper has a lot of power. Sending postcards through the mail, advertsing your website has also been proven to be quite productive. Having flyers made up from your local print shop, and distributing them to certain areas around town is also a great way to use the power of offline advertising. These avenues are sometimes forgotten by people trying to get the word out, when promoting their products.

Buzz Advertising

Many people are scared to try buzz advertising, but it can work if you have a good idea on your website. Audio postcards were a good idea that never took off - buzz advertising could have made them more successful. Get talking about your product, and get your friends and relatives to do the same. Leave business cards with your website lying around, and get posters going about it. The more work you put into buzz advertising, the more effective it becomes.

Website traffic is very important to your online business, and it is the lifeblood of your business. You will have to find and use the techniques that are best suited to you. Why don’t you go out on a limb and try some of the methods that are mentioned above.

If you don’t have and use the proper traffic generation techniques, you will not receive the proper amount of traffic. And without traffic your online business will suffer.

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Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Thursday 31 July 2008 @ 11:51 am

by Rachel Ray

Search engines like Google and others similar, are critical to helping people connect with the web businesses they are searching for. There are companies out there that claim to get your page rankings so high that you’ll gladly pay high prices to make it happen. Not every website can or wants to go that route however.

The best way is to try to get free organic website traffic, meaning when someone searches for a term or phrase in the search engine, those pages that come up are “organic” type listings. Being on page one is highly desirable as few people search beyond the first one or two pages listed. This is different than the paid ads you see on the right hand side of the page, other wise known as “pay per click” ads. Trying to get listed at a high page rank is known as search engine optimization or SEO and boils down to:

1. Content is King. You need real content on your web site; this is content that has real meaning to real people, not just keyword stuffing. Search engines send out programs called web crawlers or web spiders that index web sites. The number one thing those web crawlers are looking for is content. They determine if a web site has content by tracking keyword phrases. This is why search engine optimization usually starts by picking keywords and writing content around them; a lot of web site marketing gurus advocate keyword stuffing well past the point of sanity and effectiveness. Anything more than about 2-4% of the words in an article and the web sites will filter it out it’s too obviously “gaming the system”.

2. Links back to your site from other’s sites provide validation. The more links particularly links that relate to your site’s content, the higher your page ranking will be. Methods to get link backs range from link exchanges with other websites in related topics, to writing articles about the topic you’re dealing with, to social bookmarking sites and such.

3. Updated, and expanding content. You can’t just put a page up and expect to keep the same page ranks. Your site needs to have new material, this is important not just for web spiders, but for human visitors as well. If they can expect to see something new and interesting at least three times a week, they’ll keep coming back and it takes an average of seven visits before someone decides to either post in a forum or buy something in a shopping cart.

4. Web layouts that make sense. Your web site should have clean navigational links, your front page should have links to everything else on your site.

5. Text rules everything in web content. Search engine spiders ignore Javascript, they ignore graphics, and until very recently, they couldn’t read text in Flash animations. If the search engine spiders can’t read it, it doesn’t get used to help your page rankings.

The real secret to long term success with web site optimization is to make sure your site is usable and interesting, both to the search engine spiders and to your human visitors. Keep adding fresh content that makes them both want to come back for more, and your site will continue to grow in popularity with both.

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How to Make Your Website Attract Qualified Traffic

Thursday 31 July 2008 @ 9:29 am

by Ricardo d Argence

Internet marketing has everything to do with driving traffic to your website. There are many methods of generating visitors to your website to chose from. All the techniques the Internet marketers will use at some point involve the search engines. So many people use the search engines to find information about anything and everything.

When you have your website rated high in the search engine, you will see unlimited hits and profits that you can take to the bank. SEM, search engine marketing, is at the very heart of generating quality traffic to your site. When your site comes up high the SERP’s results page, after entering keywords from your site; you know you have done something right.

Let’s say you have the greatest promotional website on the whole Internet for pet supplies. Your URL is your website’s address. Sooner or later, Google will come along with their index spiders and go over your entire pet supply website then index it.

Simply telling your friends to search for a common term, such as “pet supplies”, is not an effective way to ensure that your website will show up as the first listing. You’ll get in excess of 68,000,000 hits if you search the phrase “pet supplies” on Google. This is the reason as to why SEM is so vital. You have to exposure with the aim of people can discover you.

SEM will include SEO, which is search engine optimization, search engine submissions, search engine maps, local search methods, PPC (Pay-Per-Click) along with other search tools and keywords. The concept of PPC advertising is one of the most efficient ways to effectively market your site in modern search engines.

This is easy to do when you join a PPC advertising company, just make up a short advertisement with your choice of keywords that will attract customers in your market. When someone does a search for a keyword that you have chosen, your ad will appear along side of the search results.

If you used a good keyword, it will generally show up on the first page. When the search engine user sees you ad and clicks on it, they end up on your website. You pay the PPC company for each click when someone clicks on your ad. This method is a very popular way of generating traffic.

Keep in mind you should always use SEO on your web page. Websites use a certain standard called SEO for search engines. The better the SEO, the higher in rank your website will show up in search engine results. Site optimization begins with properly place keywords imbedded throughout the textual content of your site. You must take in to consideration how important it is to keep your website relevant to the information you’re trying to convey. Google appreciates those who click on forward links and other pertinent pages inside the text also.

A few things not to do when using SEO is keyword stuffing. If your keywords are used out of context or over saturated, it will cost you in rank. There is much more detailed information that is available about SEO that you can resource online for free.

There are a few things to keep in mind when using search engine marketing. Almost every method for generating traffic is reliant in some way to the search engines. There are also many different pay services that you can outsource to companies that will take care of all the advertising through search engines for you.

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Instantly Increasing Web Site Visitors? Impossible?

Thursday 31 July 2008 @ 3:41 am

by Jeffrey S. Gross

Generating traffic means getting potential customers to visit your Web site. This obviously is a must if you want to have a successful business on-line.

Bringing internet traffic your way can pose as quite an intimidating challenge, as you are competing with millions and millions of other Web sites for attention. Moreover, new sites are being launched pretty much every day. Simply creating a nice site and getting it published won’t automatically attract customers. New and smaller sites are always vying for attention with mammoth, internationally known Web sites.

Why is that? Well, when people use one of the search engines (for example, Google, Ask.com or Alta Vista) to look for specific items or information on anything from shoes to business plans, they receive pages and pages of URLs that potentially include the information they seek.

Knowing this, you can see how such sites as Wikipedia, eBay or Amazon would appear well before yours. If your site is really small or really new, if may not appear under a search term for dozens of pages, where few if any Web surfers will ever find you.

Relying solely on search engine ranking isn’t the only way to generate traffic to your site, thank goodness. Experiment with different approaches for helping people to find your site. The following are three ways to accomplish that goal:

Engage in link exchanges with other non-competing Web sites: Your search engine ranking improves (you appear on an earlier page under specific search terms) when you have other sites link into yours. Adding their links to your site helps the other site owners, too. Find sites with information or products that go well with yours, and suggest exchanging links. Another way to get your URL on other sites is to initiate a blog on one of the blogging sites (two of which are blogger.com and blogspot.com), including a link to your site in each blog entry.

Write free articles for other sites: Many Web owners seek to keep the content on their sites fresh, or send out e-mail newsletters (known as e-zines) to regular customers that subscribe to them. In exchange for providing them with free material they can use, these site owners will allow you to include your Web site information within or at the end of the article, which can lead people from their site to yours.

Off-line advertising: Just like off-line stores and businesses, you can use traditional methods for advertising your Web site. This can run from placing television and radio ads to making sure your Web site information appears prominently on any paper materials you distribute. You can even create promotional giveaways such as key rings, travel mugs or magnets that carry include your Web address.

Cheap Targeted Web site Traffic: This option is the easiest of the bunch. It requires minimal amounts of work and it truly gets your web site legitimate visitors fast. To sum it up, you don’t need to create anything, develop links, or even move a muscle. If you pick a reputable traffic dealer, you will be seeing real visitors showing up at your website. You will be utilizing their websites popularity to get your site visitors, it is a great way for any webmaster to get some real traffic. Please read on for our company recommendations.

In a nutshell, you need to get your URL out there so that people can find you, and most of these are relatively low cost ways to start. Incorporate these traffic generating techniques into your internet marketing strategy and watch the number of visitors to your site and your sales start to grow.

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Email Marketing Campaign For Maximum Effect

Thursday 31 July 2008 @ 3:29 am

by Ray Lam

An email campaign one of the most effective ways of reaching potential customers, and if you know how to structure your email campaign properly to maximum effect it can be one of the best types of online marketing for your business.

With you email marketing campaign, be sure that all aspects of your business are in sync with your email campaign. In other words, is customer service ready to field questions? Do sales have the inventory to meet your customer?s needs? There?s no point in sending out an email extolling the virtues of a new product if people can?t order it or answer questions. Just be sure that all systems are a-go before you send out that email. Otherwise, your attempts at furthering a reputation of being a reliable and sophisticated business will instantly be thwarted.

What this has meant is that the seller has the perfect chance to build up a relationship with the prospect. This in turn will open up many other chances in future for making sales. This works out much best and much more effectively as an email marketing campaign than the one-off hit or miss effort.

It is better by far to build your own opt-in list, and if you do not yet have one that should be your first step. It will take time, but is necessary for your success, so put your email campaign on the back burner for now and get that list started.

If you are new to email marketing or you’re getting ready to kick off a new campaign, then it might be a good idea to bring in someone with a proven track record to assist you. This could be a consulting firm or a professional in the email marketing industry. Since email marketing is constantly changing it will probably be money well spent to get someone to assist you. You will not only get their expert advice but also some valuable training as well.

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