Unfortunately, when it comes to your website, the "if you build it, they will come" strategy just doesn't work. Fortunately, there are many ways to drive high-quality traffic to your website for little to no cost. The following 5 strategies will show you how:
1. Optimize your site for the search engines.
You'd have to be a fulltime search engine optimization expert to keep up with all the changes the major search engines make, but there are a few basic things you can do to help your site come up for relevant searches. Here are some to get you started:
a. Define your keywords - this is how people will find your business online. The trick is to find keywords that are highly relevant to what you offer and popular enough that they will attract decent traffic to your site, but not so competitive that you can't rank well using them. Use your keywords in your web page copy.
b. Create your metatags - this is how the search engines "read" your site. Put your keywords in your metatags on each page of your website.
c. Don't use lots of graphics or Flash, frames, or "alt" tags in HTML for pictures - search engines don't like them because it makes it hard for them to "read" your site.
d. Submit your site to the search engines - (see #2).
e. Get links to your site - create a page in your website and call it either resources or links and add GOOD links, meaning relevant links. Linking is the second biggest indicator of how your site is ranked.
2. Submit your site to the search engines.
Why wait for the search engines' robots or spiders to find you? Submit your website (it's best if you submit every page individually) to at least these four major search engines and directories manually. It's easy and only takes a minute.
Submit your web pages to:
Alexa: http://pages.alexa.com/hrlp/webmasters/index.html
Yahoo at http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
Google at http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
DMoz at http://www.dmoz.com/add.html
3. Swap ads with other ezines in your niche.
Seek out other ezines in your niche whose publishers might be interested in swapping ads. They can either be formals ads, or just a recommendation within the content of the ezine itself. I've used this strategy myself, with the result being lots of new visitors to my website and new subscribers to my ezine.
4. Be a bonus participant.
You're probably aware of the tactic of adding valuable bonuses to your offerings to encourage people to buy. As a traffic-building technique, you could do the same for someone else's product offering. For example, when Andrea Lee released her second edition of "Multiple Streams of Coaching Income" print book, one of my audio products was offered as a bonus to those who bought the book. I received loads of new visitors to my website and had a nice spike in ezine subscribers as well as a result.
5. Become an "ask the expert" on a high-traffic website in your niche.
Seek out websites that are information portals for your niche, and see if they offer an "ask the expert" section (and if they don't, you could always suggest they do). Offer your services as an expert, to answer questions from their visitors about the challenges they face.
For example, I'm the online marketing expert at www.womans-net.com, and an expert within the Circle of Experts at www.adrpracticebuilder.com and I get targeted traffic from people visiting these sites.
Owning a domain name that helps to successfully "magnetize" a flood of incoming traffic is like gold to any online business. But the increasing scarcity of domain names that are simple to remember, short and suggestive have turned them into red hot commodities.
Just take a look at some of the recent domain name acquisitions:
· business.com sold for $7.5 million
· asseenontv.com sold for $5 million
· altavista.com sold for $3.3 million
· loans.com sold for $3 million
· autos.com sold for $2.2 million
· wallstreet.com sold for $1.03 million
· forsalebyowner.com sold for $835,000
· drugs.com sold for $825,000
· cinema.com sold for $700,000
· art.com sold for $450,000
· engineering.org sold for $199,000
· fruits.com sold for $160,000
· perfect.com sold for $94,000
However, while some of these domain names may have been sold for millions, corporate buyers backed by large bank accounts are not alone in the domain name game. Even entrepreneurs are making a great living in purchasing and selling their own domains.
Not a day goes by, that a domain name sells for as less as $100 or as much as $1 million on public auction sites. For example, eBay.com recently featured actual bids for as little as $500 for "golegs.com" to as much as $20,000 for "arlington.com" -- and thousands more drifting anywhere in between.
Some people seem to know where to get these "nuggets of gold." In fact, a small handful know about an untapped goldmine that lies discreetly tucked away in the dark corners of the vast Internet. And the awareness of this source has helped these "lucky" individuals earn either outrageous fortunes or monstrous levels of traffic for their website.
The goldmine to which I'm referring is the pool of recently expired domain names. While only a few knows it exists, regardless it is expanding with every passing day. There are literally tens of thousands of unclaimed, non-renewed and expired domain names that become available on a daily basis.
An expired domain name is one that was registered previously but was not paid for in time for the renewal date, thus returning it to the listing of available domains. There are many probable reasons for non-renewal (e.g., forgetful owner, no more interest in site, no longer in business, no longer active or didn't pay for whatever reason).
However, you may be asking, "Sure, but I'm never going to find good domain names before some other person snatches them up." For a long time, being "lucky" also meant being alert for the numerous domains that become available, and being quick in registering them before anyone else does.
New tools are becoming available, making the process of searching, finding and registering great domain names much easier. In fact, some of them assist you to become aware of the near expiring domains, giving you an advantage over your competitors that permits you to grab names seconds after they've been dropped.
Nevertheless, a compelling domain name can help an online business become more visible, credible and accessible. And it will help someone earn a rather large fortune. While in the past, finding one was very prohibitive, with the help of tools that are now at your disposal, you now can be a part of the gold rush, too.
Learn the secret methods to boost your adsense earnings overnight
Most webmasters know that Adsense generates a sizeable source of additional advertising income. That is why most of them use it to go after high paying keywords. They have with them the lists that tells what the keywords are and have already used various methods of identifying them. And yet, after putting up these supposed-to-be high paying keywords into their pages, the money they expected to come rolling in is not really coming in.
What is it that they are doing wrong? Having the pages is with the proper keywords is one thing. But driving visitors to those pages is another matter and often the factor that is lacking. The thing is, to get visitors to your high paying keyword pages, you need to optimize your site navigation. Stop for a moment and think about how visitors are using your website. After a visitor has landed on a certain page, they have the tendency to click on another page that sounds interesting. They get there because of the other links that appears on a page that they initially landed on. This is site navigation. It is all about enabling visitors to move about your site. And one way of maximizing your Adsense earnings. A typical website have menu links on each page. The wording on these links is what grabs a visitor’s attention and gets them to click on one of the links that will take them to another page of that website. Links that have “free’ or “download” are oftentimes good attention-grabbers. This navigation logic can also be applied to driving traffic to your high paying pages. There are some websites that are getting a lot of traffic from search engines, but have low earnings. The trick is to try and use come cleverly labeled links to get the visitors off that pages and navigate them to the higher earning ones. This is one great way of turning real cheap clicks to real dollars. Before you begin testing if this same style will work for you and your website, you need to have two things. Something to track and compare and some high earning pages you want to funnel your site traffic to. An option is to select a few of your frequently visited pages. This is ensuring fast result to come by. Now, the next thing to do is think of ways to get visitors viewing a particular page to try and click on the link that will take them to your high earning pages. Come up with a catchy description for that link. Come up with a catchy and unique description for the link. Think of something that people do not get to see everyday. That will trigger their curiosity enough to try and see what that was all about. You can also use graphics to grab your readers’ attention. There is no limitation to what you can do to make your link noticeable. If you are after the success of your site, you will do everything it takes just to achieve that goal. Just be creative. As far as many Adsense advertisers are concerned, there are no written and unwritten laws to follow regarding what they write. Just as long as you do not overstep the guidelines of the search engines, then go for it. Also remember that it is all about location, location and location. Once the perfect attention grabbing description has been achieved, you have to identify the perfect spot on your page to position that descriptive link to your high paying page. There is nothing wrong with visiting other websites to see how they are going about maximizing their site navigation. “Hot pages” or “Most read” lists are very common and overly used already. Get to know the ones that many websites are using and do not try to imitate them. Another way of doing it is to try and use different texts on different pages. That way you will see the ones that work and what does not. Try to mix things around also. Put links on top and sometimes on the bottom too. This is how you go about testing which ones get more clicks and which ones are being ignored. Let the testing begin. Testing and tracking until you find the site navigation style that works best for you site.
There are many ways how to do SEO. Sometimes SEO can be a pain in your head... But if you approach it from the right angle it can be quick effective and even fun.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is one of the best methods to generate targeted traffic to your website. Traffic comes from organic search engine listings and from my own experience, this traffic is the most targeted and hence valuable. Conversion rates are far way better from organic traffic than from any paid advertisement like AdWords. Nowadays internet is flooded with swindlers and scams, that’s why paid ads are getting less and less trusted...
This is why I consider SEO as the only reliable way to go for a long-term online business. First off, you need to choose one of all these techniques and strategies how to do SEO. It’s really easy to get lost in the beginning but then you will get more and more confident with every right step you make. Making on-page optimization is the most reasonable first step you can make.
On-page optimization means maintaining your keyword density at 2-4% out of all content, setting up the appropriate meta tags (not that important these days as it was before) and page tittles. If you have any images on your website, don’t forget to set your main keyword as an alt text of these images. Having your main keyword in the domain name is a very good idea to boost your rankings as well. These steps are the easiest from the whole SEO process and not making them chances are you are wasting your rankings straight away.
When you are fine with on-page SEO it’s time to get on off-page optimization. Many marketers dislike this process defining it as tedious one. Well, I can say that it’s all about how you are approaching it. When you know how to do SEO and are confident about the future results of your work, it’s not tedious or boring at all. Best of all is to set up your own working plan ad follow it.
When starting off-page SEO optimization it’s important to remember about the quality of backlinks you generate. Ten quality backlinks to your site worth a lot more than hundred of low-quality backlinks. How do we define if the backlink is quality... Link from relevant and high-respected website considered to be a quality one. Page rank is also an important bit. On the first stage you want to focus on building quality backlinks, this will boost your website rankings well. If you start off with crappy links back, Google will treat your website the same way.
The power of fast and effective SEO lies behind instant and quality backlinks. Instant link –appears online straight away without any approval process. How can we avoid waiting for our backlinks to be approved along with our articles or blog comments? This is actually easier than you ever imagined.
