Friday, July 30, 2010

Increase your Website Traffic - SEO Basics

Here is a simple list of SEO tips and tactics to help get more traffic and links to your website with some very simple and easy to follow steps.

Many people think that having a good website is all you need to get tons of visitors. Wrong answer. Getting traffic to your site takes hard work and diligence and is not accomplished overnight.

Think about it this way - how are people supposed to know where to find your site if you don't tell them? You must advertise. Here are some proven ways to advertise your site without spending [much] money:

The order of these does NOT matter and will not affect how your site ranks or gets traffic if you decide to do these in a different order as to how I have listed them nor will missing any of these out affect your rankings or traffic. Remember though, the more work you put in the more traffic you will get as you submit to more sites by using these different SEO tactics for link and traffic building.

Usenet Groups:
Subscribe to the Usenet groups and advertise there. A good place to start is Google Groups
  • Be sure to submit your site in appropriate groups!
  • Be sure to sign up with a backup email or you will get onto every spammers database!
  • Be sure you don't SPAM -- only submit a write up of your site once to any given group.
Directory Submissions:
Submit your site to as many privately run Link Directories/Search Engines as you can find. These will not generally boost your traffic in any major way but will help to maintain steady stream of qualified visitors.

Text Advertising / Links:
Text links and advertising is very effective, but it will cost to have your advertisement put on any site so this is something you will need to set a budget for.

Banner Advertising:
Fixed banner advertising is always a good form of advertising and is said to be much better then text links. Use Banners with care, IE only on sites in same niche as you would with directories and link exchanges.

Social Networking:
Social networking such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and mega blogging sites. This should be used to give information and not used to advertise your site/company.

Reciprocal Linking:
Reciprocal linking is a good deal but you need to watch your link partners as some people are not as honest as the next, and will remove your link after a couple of weeks once you forget about it. For this reason I recommend using a link manager for all link exchanges just to be safe as these will check your reciprocal links for you.

Three way link exchanges are similar to reciprocal linking but between three sites not just you and another. Basically site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links to site A. This form of link building will also compliment your SEO campaign as well.

Banner exchange programs:
These don't cost you a thing, but will lead to a few extra visitors. Plus, you're spreading your brand all over the place on the other sites that are signed up to the same banner exchange programs.

Pay per click and/or Affiliate Marketing Programs:
Pay per click is as the name says, you pay each time someone clicks a link to your site on search engines and/or on other sites in sponsored link sections.

Affiliate marketing can be set to use either pay per click, pay per lead, pay per sale or pay per customer acquired and generally work the same as any other pay per click program.

Email Marketing:
This is sometimes taken as being spammy but as long as it�s not over used to spam thousands it should turn out ok.

Email marketing is cost effective and you can use it to send out information about special offers and new products etc, but be nice about it and don�t over use this sending to many emails out all the time.

Reviews:
Ask users/customers (depending on the site) to write a review for you, be it short or long it's still a review and will help to show new visitors that your current client base likes how you run.

Do the odd review about your own company to get things started! Most if not all sites have done this in the past and will more than likely do it again in the future, but just make sure it looks like a real review and is only the trough!

Create your own RSS feeds or Atoms:
These are a great way to offer visitors the option to sign up to your sites news and/or update depending on how you set it up and what type of site you run.

The most important thing to remember is that you need to offer and provide good, strong content on your site for your visitors to want to come back and keep using your site, and for the search engines to see your site is worthy of the top listings.

If you want the list above to work and keep working you will need to follow these simple rules for your on site SEO tactics and keep your site fresh and up-to-date all the time.

Create good quality content that is helpful and useful to your visitors. If you just copy and paste information/content from others sites you will not get the traffic or visitors you�re looking for to stay with you as it will be old news they have all seen before.

Keep your sites and its content fresh. If you're after repeat visitors that will want to keep coming back to your site time after time, you will need to keep not only the look and feel of your site fresh but also the content you put on it. 

This means you will want to do updates on your site as often as you can and keep your visitors informed on any changes.

Outsource article writing to keep the fresh content coming in. You should be able to get some quality articles/content written for you for about $5 each (based on 500 works per article and a minimum 10 article buy so that�s just $50 for 10 articles).

Your videos on your site as well as on others such as YouTube. Everyone likes to watch a video now and then because it�s easier then reading all the time. One thing you will want to remember is not to have your video on auto play as this can annoy some people.

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