Online Punch

Everyone wants to know the big secret to driving traffic to their website. Every day I see an article or an ad talking about driving people to your website. Driving traffic to a website has become the “holy grail” on the internet. People are realizing that ‘if you build it, they won’t come… unless you give them a reason’. Website traffic just doesn’t happen by itself. Your website is just one of many millions on the web and people rarely just stumble upon your site by accident.

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website. You can
buy traffic from vendors that will pummel your website with hits from automated programs. This will increase your hits but will it increase your bottom line? Probably not. You can set up blogs that spider (connect to) your website increasing your traffic count. Does this drive users to your website? Only if your blog is sointeresting that people are reading it. There are thousands of blogs posted on the internet and your blog is just a needle in the internet haystack.

Another trick is to create RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for your website and subscribe to other RSS feeds. This again will increase your hit count but will do very little to drive potential customers to your website unless you’re providing valuable information. Tricks will increase your hit count but do very little todrive potential customers to your website.

A better way to buy traffic for your website is by using pay-per-click with Yahoo and Google. You identify the most common keywords associated with what you’re offering and bid on those keywords. This can be a costly option if you’re bidding on popular keywords but it’s a reliable way to generate highly targeted traffic. In my next newsletter I’ll go into more detail about using pay-per-click advertising.

The best way to generate traffic for your website is to provide
quality content that will solve your customer’s problems. People search the internet for information that will solve their problems. Write and post as many articles as you can on your website.If you don’t have time to write articles or can’t write then hire someone to write the articles for you. You can have quality articles written by freelance writers at www.elance.com for practically nothing. The articles should be relevant to the problems your customers are experiencing and to the services you provide to solve those customer problems. Remember, it’s all about providing solutions to your customer’s problems. Check the “How To” Articles section on my website at www.valiss.com for more information about your website
content.

The bottom line is that you can’t trick people into finding your
website. You must provide valuable information that solves your
customer’s problems. Your customers don’t come to your website
to read your blog about how you spent the weekend. They’ll come
to your website if they know they can find a solution to their most pressing issues. Keep your content fresh and relevant to solving your customer’s problems and in no time you’ll have plenty of visitors to your website.

Next time I’ll talk about how you can use pay-per-click to generate targeted traffic and not spend a fortune.

Ted Prodromou spent over 25 years in the computer industry working for IBM, Digital, and Cellular one. Today he’s the owner of Valiss IT, a consulting firm that provides small business coaching and marketing help. He’s also a certified personal and professional coach.

Ted has created and led many coaching workshops and today is helping small businesses automate their marketing with his latest coaching program, “Attract Clients While You Sleep”. For more information visit http://www.valiss.com/specials.

In the old days of world wide web, users preferred to visit web directory to find the site they are looking for. As a matter of fact, Yahoo!, one of the preferred destination for online users, started as a web directory. Nowadays, most online user base rely on search engines too along with link directories, to find what they’re looking for.

When search engines started to become popular, they were heavily relied on KEYWORDs and METATAGs of the web page to determine the topic and relevance of the page. Webmasters discovered that by keyword stuffing into METATAGs and webpage content, they could improve their website position in search results for verious keywords. But search engines are smart!. Search engines caught up to the abuse and decided to ignore the METATAGs and rely instead on text content of web page. Webmasters then started to keyword stuffing in the webpage content, often writing them in the same color as the web page’s background so for webpage visitors as well as search engines that content is invisible.

Again, search engines worked on that area and discovered the trick and decided that the best way to rank a web page’s content and its topical relevance was to rely on inbound links from other web pages. The rationale behind this is that it is much more difficult to influence other people to link back to your website than it is to manipulate your own web page elements. In fact, inbound links are the foundation of Google’s Pagerank algorithm.

There are several ways to get inbound links, among them writing articles that include your bylines with a link to your page, link exchange, and add link to web directory are the poupler techniques.

Listing your sites in good link directories is probably the best way to get quality links that are highly valued by the search engines. Since web directories rely on human editors who enforce strict criteria to list a web site, and since directories organize the information in highly focused categories, they are an invaluable resource for search engines to measure the quality and the relevance of a web page.

In summary, web directories are important not because they generate significant traffic, but because they are given great importance by the search engines to qualify and rank web pages, and to determine their topical relevance.

So the bottomline is, you should definitely list your websites with quality web directory such as www.itsallaboutlinks.com, if you want to increase your chances of success with the search engines.

Paras Shah

http://www.itsallaboutlinks.com : Web Directory - Add Link - Submit Article - Website Design - SEO Services