Building Traffic To Your Website
Building traffic to your website
In order for a webmaster to succeed in building a valuable website, you need traffic. Traffic, in short, is the number of visitors to a website, which will eventually determine the success of your website in terms of monetary resell value.
In building traffic to your website, and before we continue with this guide, you need to take into account the golden rule:
“Building traffic does not cost a lot of money, but rather some time and effort you dedicate to establishing a good traffic base. Also, remember, traffic to your website does not happen overnight!”
In this guide we will focus on building long term and quality traffic to your website. By following the steps in this guide, you will soon find visitors visiting your website on a routine basis.
Before we continue explaining some methods you can follow in establishing traffic to your website, we need to focus on the basics first. The basics we are referring to is your website itself. You need to ensure that your website is in the correct format and complete before you attempt any of the suggestions contained in this guide.
An improper formulated or incomplete website will prevent your site from being promoted correctly and will cause you to loose tons of potential visitors.
Your website
A completed website
The first and foremost important factor is to ensure that the design and information contained within your website is complete. There should be no broken hyperlinks between pages, broken links to images or ‘Under Construction’ pages.
Take the time to visit each page of your website and ensure that it is complete. Make use of this opportunity to look at spelling or grammatical errors and fix them.
Your HTML Structure
The HTML structure of a website is of utmost importance when it comes to search engine visibility. If your HTML structure is correct, the majority of search engines will be in a position to crawl your website. An incorrect HTML structure will lead to you losing thousands of potential visitors as search engines will be prevented from crawling and indexing your website.
When looking at your HTML structure, there are three tags that should always be present and completed on each and every website page. They are:
1. The Title Tag
2. The Meta Description Tag
3. The Meta Keywords Tag
These tags are used by search engines to identify the contents of your web pages.
Tip: In each of these attributes you should always mention your main keyword of your website at least once, but not more than twice.
Another important tag in your web pages is the <h1> <h2> and <h3> tags. These are often refer to as your Heading tags and many search engines pay particular attention to these tags in order to identify the content of the various web pages.
Many search engines only look at the first <h1> tag, as this is seen as the most important tag. For this reason, you will always ensure that your Heading tags contain at least your most important keyword.
Years ago, Meta tags played a huge role in search engine rankings, but this has changed. Search engines have become more complicated in their algorithms when determining rankings and are now focusing more on the actual content of your web pages than on your Meta tags. For this reason you should not expect high rankings in search engine results, but rather ensure that your website is at least crawled and indexed.
Search Engine Spiders
Search engine spiders, in short a programmed script, which will visit your website and collect certain information, such as content, code, link popularity, etc. This information is then analysed by an algorithm which will determine your search engine ranking for various keywords related to your website.
Here are some tips, which will ensure that search engine spiders read the content of your website:
1. Use HTML
Although various scripting languages, such as Javascript or flash, add cool features to your website, the majority of search engines do not read these scripts. Limit the usage of these scripts to the utmost minimum and stick to the plain old HTML language.
2. Use of Keywords
Search engines love reading information contained in tags. When placing images on your web pages always attempt to add keywords as descriptions to the images.
When making use of hyperlinks to internal web pages, make use of keywords that describe the different pages you’re linking to. As example, instead of creating a hyperlink like: Click here, rather create a link like: Visit my Car Racing page.
When creating your pages, always ensure that keywords are used in the filenames associated with your web pages. As example, if you have many pages do not name them page1.html, page2.html, page3.html. Rather spend time at looking at each page’s content and create page names like car-racing.html, car-accidents.html, etc.
3. Google Adsense
If you are signed up as a member of Google Adsense ensure that the ads are placed throughout your website. Once your website is uploaded and live, Google will automatically start to crawl your website.
Images
Ensure that all your images have completed HTML tags with descriptions. These are often great for search engine listings, such as Google’s Image search.
Great, we are done looking at your website. You have corrected and completed your website content and HTML source.
We are now ready to start with the recommended steps in attracting traffic to your website.
Day 1 – Search Engine Submission
There are tens of thousands of search engines on the Internet. Just by doing a Google search will damp the spirit of many prospective webmasters when they realise the large number of search engines they will need to submit their websites to.
Do not fear, here is a secret you need to know about search engines. The majority of Internet users only use a handful of search engines, with Google being the most popular, followed by Yahoo! The majority of search engines on the Internet are Meta search engines, meaning they extract their results from the larger search engines such as Google and Yahoo!
“So what are you trying to say?” you might ask. Well, what we are saying is that you need only to submit your website to a small number of search engines, the bigger ones. Eventually your website will appear on all the smaller search engines.
The first and foremost important step is to start submitting your website to the following search engines:
Google.com – http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo.com – https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
Live.com – http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx
Entireweb.com – http://www.entireweb.com/free_submission/
Scrubtheweb.com – http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html
Alexa.com – http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters#crawl_site
While at Alexa.com, also take a few moments to update the contact information for your website. If possible, download and install the Alexa browser. Each time you visit your website and work on it, you will be increasing your Alexa rank.
Aboutus.com
Go to the website, aboutus.com – www.aboutus.com. In the search box type in the URL of your website. A page will then be created automatically for your website. Having a page in aboutus.com is great for a backlink and actual traffic over a period of time.
You can now create an account with Aboutus.com and start to edit your website’s page.
Great, you have completed the submission. Now, please remember not to submit your website to any of the above-mentioned sites within at least 8 weeks. By submitting your site again may lead to you being banned from being listed in these search engines.
In all likelihood you will still have some time on your hand for the rest of today. Why not use this by submitting your website manually to smaller search engines? As stated, this is not necessary as many of them will display your results in any event when you are indexed by the larger search engines. In some instances, smaller search engines may index you quicker if you manually submit your website to them.
A list of recommended search engines and Day 2 and beyond totaling 15 pages can be purchased through the link below.
Topics covered are:
Day 2 & 3 – Directory Submissions
Day 4 – Bookmarking Your Site
Day 5 – Commenting on Blogs
Day 6 – Links Exchange
Day 7- 8 – Forum Posting
11 Steps Guide
BY: Kaung Ko | KMKBlog.com
