Building a website is only half of the battle. The other half
is the tough part, getting people to visit. A quality website
is worthless without a steady stream of people that can make
use of the information (and possibly make you money, depending
on the type of website in question).
Never fear though, because we have some great ways to bring
traffic to your website. Before you know it, you'll have
more visitors than you know what to do with!
The first point is the obvious one. You've got to have a
website worth visiting. Quality content that is updated consistently
is the key. Ask yourself, if you were just a normal visitor,
would you want to visit this website? Is there anything you
would find of use? If the answer is no, start by changing
that first.
-Linking Up-
Getting links to your site is a great way to achieve quick,
quality traffic. It can also be quite difficult, since you
have to convince a webmaster that your site is good enough
to show their visitors. An easy way, without dealing directly
with humans, is to go around and submit your website to free
directories. A simple Google search, with some creativity,
will uncover thousands of free directories that have categories
for nearly everything. These directories are awesome ways
to get traffic to your site, as well as influence the search
engines a little bit.
The other way to get links is the old fashioned way. Fire
up your email client, and send out some emails to the owners
of websites you feel would be willing to link to you. Don't
spam sites, but write quality emails to the owners asking
if they would be interested in linking to your site. The
best kind of websites to email are those with “links” pages,
as they are the most likely to add you, since there is already
a place for your site to go.
-The Search Engines-
By far the number one tool that people use to find information,
search engines are definitely something you want to have
on your site. Focus on the big three – Google, Yahoo!
and MSN. Forget the rest. The others won't bring you enough
traffic to make it worth while.
The best way to tame a search engine is to get it to see
plenty of links to your site. Not spammy ones, because they
will discount your site for that, but direct links to your
site from high quality websites. Remember, if you want to
rank high in search engines, you have to start by going out
and gathering links. There is no other legitimate way.
Manually submitting your site to a search engine doesn't
do much, as if you have any number of backlinks at all, the
spiders will find your site with no issues. If you don't
have enough links for them to find you, then there is no
way you will rank high anyway.
Be sure to have clear titles for your website. Don't use
the same title for every page on your site, make each one
a unique, descriptive title for each individual page. This
is very important.
Don't panic if you don't rank well at first. Most engines,
especially Google, have “sandboxes” that they
put new websites in for the first few months. You probably
won't rank well until after that period is over.
-Your PR Rating-
Google uses a system of rating websites called PR, short
for Page Rank. PR is a score, between 1 and 10, that is given
to an individual page based upon the number and quality of
links pointing to that web page. When a page with a PR rating
links to another page, it “passes on” some of
its PR to that page. For example, if I have a new web page,
with no PR rating, and a PR 6 page links to it, that page
may eventually have a PR rating of, say, 4 or 5. Google uses
the PR rating of a page to help decide where to place it
on search results for a particular keyword. Keep in mind,
however, that PR is not the only factor used in deciding
where you will rank with search engines, it is just one of
many.
You can view the PR rating of a website by downloading the
free Google toolbar.
-Non-Reciprocal Linking-
Webmasters commonly use a form of linking known as reciprocal
linking, which is just trading links. Site A links to site
B, and site B links back to site A. It's a good idea in theory,
however, search engines have started picking up on it. Link
trading is no longer a good thing to do. The best kind of
linking is to have a one-way link to your site (you can talk
a webmaster into it by being nice, or perhaps by trading
services, or maybe even buying a link from him or her), or
by finding a webmaster with more than one site to link with.
If you choose the latter, the most common way is for you
to link to someone's site, and for them to link back to your
site on a different site of theirs. For example, you have
a website (we'll call it site “B”), and the other
person has two websites (we'll call them site “A” and
site “C”). Site A links to site B, which links
to site C. Search engines can't figure this out, and you
both get quality links back to your sites. Just be sure that
site C doesn't link to site A to form a ring, other wise
it's just old-fashioned reciprocal linking with a third site
thrown in.
-Press Releases-
An easy way to get traffic to your site is to issue press
releases. It can be gold when it comes to traffic, but oddly
enough, it is often overlooked by webmasters. It doesn't
take much time to set up a press release, and there are plenty
of free PR publishing websites on the internet, so set aside
some time to issue one. The rewards could quite well be worth
your time.
-RSS Feeds-
An RSS news feed on your website is another way to get traffic
to your site that is often overlooked. Keep in mind, however,
this will be useless unless you update your site with quality
content, and often too.
-Gotta Spend Money to Make Money-
If all else fails, there are two sure-fire ways to get traffic
to your site, but they will both cost you money. The first
is the easiest: Simply hire an SEO (Search-Engine-Optimization)
firm. They are pros that specialize in making your website
rank well in search engines. They will cost you a pretty
penny, but turn your site over to them, and they'll do all
of the work for you.
The other way is Pay-Per-Click advertising, such as the
Google Adwords program. A carefully configured campaign will
allow you to pay a few cents per click to your site, and
if you have a for-profit website, it is very easy to turn
those clicks into profit for yourself, with very little work.
It's definitely worth a shot if you have never tried it before.
Ryan Bauer is a large-scale webmaster who runs a
Web
Hosting Review website and writes how-to articles for
advanced computer users.
