Driving Traffic to Your Website

Once your website is up, you'll want as many visitors as possible. You want to drive traffic to your website until your hosting servers crashes. The more visitors you get, the better chances you have of earning money from your website. A high-traffic website commands high advertising rates. If you're using Adsense, the higher the traffic the more chances your ads will get clicked. If you're selling affiliate products, high traffic will almost always translate to higher sales for you.

People find information from the web using search engines, the most popular one being Google. And if you want to get high traffic volume, you will have to rank high in the search engines search results page or the SERPs. Surfers rarely click past the first page of the SERPs and there are only a limited number of spots in the first page. Every webmaster's goal then is to get to the first page of the SERPs.

An entire industry was built around Search Engine Optimization or SEO. You can hire a company to promote your website but these companies usually charge higher than what a small business can afford. The solution? Do it yourself. There are many ways to promote your website and to get to the top of the SEO and discussing them all in detail might need thousands of pages.

What you'll learn here is the general idea on how SEO works. There are two distinct divisions of SEO. One is the on-site optimization which you have already learned a little about in the earlier sections. On-site optimization is simply making sure that your content is search engine friendly. The search engines want useful content so their customers, the surfers, will find the information they need.

It's a win-win-win situation really if you follow the quality content tip. The surfers win as they get the information they need; the search engines win as they have another satisfied customer; and you the publisher wins because the content you worked so hard on is getting traffic.

Quality content is the basis of all on site SEO techniques. Don't worry too much about how much you repeat a keyword or how many words your article has. Just focus on giving quality content and you will reap the rewards soon enough.

The other part of SEO, the off-site part, is generally about getting links to your website. A link back to your website is considered by Google as a vote of confidence for your webpage. Again, quality content plays a major role in getting backlinks. If you publish authority posts, then you'll almost certainly get back links from related websites.

It is also important to note that not all backlinks are created equal. A link from a website that has a high PR (PageRank) will definitely boost your rankings. Link farms will not boost your rankings but you might get penalized if you agree with a link exchange with a link farm. Link farms are web sites with hundreds of links and little usable content and are frowned upon by search engines because of their poor user experiences. The search engines are run by very smart people and any attempt to 'trick the system' might work for some time but will sooner or later get discovered and the site using 'black hat' techniques will get penalized. Here are some 'legal' techniques that you can use:

1. You can safely submit your website to related directories.  
2. You can use social bookmarking websites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and others.  
3. You can post a classified ad in Craigslist.  
4. You can write authority posts like Ten Best/Worst Anything that attracts backlinks.  
5. You can submit articles to article directories that allow backlinks to your site. 
6. You can make videos and post on sites like YouTube. 

These are but a few techniques that you can use to generate traffic and backlinks. This can take some time but they are effective.

An easier way is to use Site Build It. This solution automatically submits your sites to the search engines automatically. Over 60% of Site Build It websites are at the top 3% of the search engines results. That means they're the ones that make money.

 << Previous |  Next >>

• The Best Way to Build a Sustainable Online Business
• How Websites Make Money
• Building Websites the Right Way
• Keyword Research
• Creating Content for Your Website
• Building the Website
• Driving Traffic to Your Website
• Reaping the Rewards

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