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Traffic Building - Understanding The Basics
By James Leckie, Sat Dec 10th
So, you've spent hundreds of thousands on a state-of-the-artwebsite. Your client is happy, and your hard work has paid off.The site goes live and the telesales team is standing by for aflood of enquiries. Nothing happens. Why? It is easy to forget that the key aim of any web marketer is toattract visitors. They must not only bring in the visitors, butalso keep them there, and encourage them to return on a regularbasis. It doesn't matter how good your site is, if nobodyvisits! There are many myths surrounding the art of traffic generation,often created by unscrupulous web marketers who claim they can'double your site traffic for just $99 per month' or 'submityour site to 1000 search engines and watch your traffic grow'.Such bogus claims should be ignored if you are serious abouttraffic.
In reality, building site traffic is far simpler than you maythink, and inexpensive. In fact, you can build a sizeablecommunity for your site at no great cost. From initial web page design to traffic generation, there areseveral key stages which should be followed to attract visitorsto your site. We have expanded on each of these topics inarticles on http://www.trafficgeneration.com Configuration of your web pages Time spent configuring the code in each of your web pages priorto search engine submission will pay dividends in the long run.Not only should the META TAGS in each page be optimised for eachkey search engine, but care an attention should be paid to theratio of 'keywords' to page content, and the use of 'ALT' and'Header' tags for example. Search engines use complex algorithmsto determine how high your pages should rank for the keywordsyou specify in the underlying code. Good code configuration willlead to good traffic. Submission to search engines and indexes There may well be over 1000 search engines and indexes on theinternet. However, there are only a dozen engines with
any realclout. Google and Yahoo dominate the web in terms of traffic,followed by a raft of medium sized search engines. Ignore theads claiming to 'boost your site traffic'. Just concentrate onthese key sites (most importantly, Google), and submit to thesmaller sites if you have time. Reciprocal links / Link Popularity Not only will links to your site from others increase yourranking on some search engines, but also they will ensure aconstant stream of targetted traffic to your site. You want theright visitors for your product or service, not random visitors.It is worth exchanging links with sites with a similar theme toyour own. You won't lose traffic, if your exchanged links arebringing the same amount (or more) back to your own site. Moreimportantly however, Google measures your site's "linkpopularity" (the number of sites which link to yours) todetermine its page ranking, so effort in this area is essential.The more relevant these links are to the content of your ownsite offering, the better. Also ensure your site is well linkedtogether, since internal links also count towards your site'sGoogle Pagerank. Maintaining your traffic Traffic building is not a one off process. It is a permanentactivity. Search engines may drop your pages when they re-index(which happens periodically), or may not index your pages at allduring busy times. Search engine submission should be an ongoingactivity, with each page resubmitted on a monthly basis, as ageneral guideline. If your pages do not rank highly first time,you will need to revisit the source code in under performingpages, and resubmit. These initial steps deal with the physical process of initialtraffic generation. Following these steps will bring youvisitors, then it is up to you to keep them coming back formore. Good site content, structure and positioning are key tobuilding a lasting web community. About the author:James Leckie is founder of http://www.trafficgeneration.com, thesearch engine portal, and http://www.bytestart.co.uk, the UKsmall business portal.
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