SEO | Search Engine Positioning

Posts Tagged ‘consuming’

If you have a website you need traffic, that’s obvious. But how do you get it? In the next few paragraphs I will outline a strategy that will help you to achieve tons of the best traffic – targeted search engine traffic – and all for free!

Let’s first of all look at some ways in which you can approach the subject of obtaining traffic for your website.

1. You can buy visitors. There are hundreds of websites out there who will sell you visitors. You can have 100,000 visitors delivered to your site in 30 days. The trouble with this is that the visitors haven’t asked to see your site and will probably leave immediately and it costs money.

2. You can pay to have your site optimised for the search engines. This can help but it can be very expensive.

3. You can use pay-per-click advertising. This can be effective but if you are in a competitive category it can be work out very costly.

The methods above all have two things in common – their effectiveness can be doubtful and they cost money.

What if there was an alternative? A way to obtain a high search engine ranking and have hundreds, if not thousands, of other websites send you traffic by the ton, all for free?

Well, such an alternative exists.

Before I tell you what it is, let me say a few words about link popularity. It is well known that the major search engines will regard your site as being more important and your rankings will therefore increase, if you are seen to have large numbers of incoming links from websites that are themselves regarded as important.

Now, some websites have thousands of pages of keyword-rich content. They have high rankings and are favoured by the search engines. Just the sort of sites that you would want to get free traffic from and have your links on, am I right? Well, you can!

What’s more, these websites will allow you to hitch a ride off their massive traffic, top search engine placements and let you advertise on hundreds of web pages, all for free!

What are these wonderful philanthropic, traffic-generating websites and how can you take advantage the opportunities that they offer?

These websites are Article Directories. There are around 100 of them containing thousands of articles in dozens of different categories. How does this help you?

It’s a two step process.
Step 1. Pick a topic and write an article about it. Choose something that is relevant to your own website.
Step 2. Submit your article to all the top online article directories, announcement lists and to other ezine publishers and webmasters.

What happens next?

You will get links to your site by the article being posted by the Article Directory sites.
You will get more links as other sites pick up your articles and reprint them.
You will get direct traffic from the Article Directory sites.
You will get indirect traffic from sites that pick up and reprint your article.
The search engines will find links from your article to your website. These are contextual links and are given more importance than links from unrelated pages.
The inward links should boost your site’s rankings, resulting in yet more traffic.

All this from just one article! And why stop there? Write an article a week or a month or whatever you can manage, and you will soon have your links spread all over the internet, bringing in more and more traffic.

Submitting your articles to Article Directories can be done but it is time consuming. Time that would be better spent writing more articles! Not only that but there is a good chance that you would miss out on several good sites for your article. I would suggest and recommend that you automate this part of the process. A good place to start is to visit http://www.articlemarketer.com?a_aid=3160c42e Here you will be able to submit articles in the knowledge that you are not missing out any important sites and also that you are complying with their submission policies.

I hope you will give this strategy a try. You have nothing to lose but could gain a great deal!

The first step to getting any traffic on the internet is getting your site indexed by the search engines – specifically, the ‘Big 3′. – Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. And there are two things you should forget about straight away.

Number One – Yes, you can submit your URL to the search engines using their online form. But be prepared to wait around for a long, long time if you’re relying on this to actually include your site in their databases. The search engines like to find your site through links on other sites, especially well ranking, established sites. With so many sites on the internet, this is their way of deciding if they should even think about addingyour site to their index – never mind the question of ranking well in their index.

Number Two – If you see an ad or service offering to submit your site to 10,000 search engines and directories – run the other way. If you have money to burn, donate it to a charity or shelter instead. At least then it would have been spent on something worthwhile. Most of your traffic will come from google, yahoo, and Microsoft. Othersearch engines don’t represent any significant amount of traffic. You will actually get more traffic from link partners or people republishing your articles than these guys. It certainly won’t get your site indexed by those that count.

So how can you get your site indexed?

1. The Slow Way

* Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking used to be more prominent amongst webmasters than it is now. It was once considered by the search engines as a good vote in favor of your site. The it got abused to the point that irrelevant results started to clog up the arteries of the search results. So these hypertensive algorithms were changed, and sites that relied too heavily on reciprocal linking lost a lot of their ranking and traffic. It can of course still provide a pathway for the search bots to find your new site. But exchanging links is time consuming and tedious. The links usually end up on a side page that exists solely for the purposes of link exchange. It doesn’t provide a very relevant and topical link, and is a really poor use of time.

Reciprocal linking hasn’t been consigned to history however. Some webmasters have so many links exchanged that together this constitutes a good flow of traffic. I do get traffic from my links. But Iget more traffic from sites that have published my articles. Reciprocal linking is a big topic – ebooks have been written with chapters devoted to it. But suffice to say, in terms of getting your new site indexed, this takes a long time, and it doesn’t leverage your time.

2. The Quick Way

* Writing Articles

Writing articles for other webmasters and ezine publishers to reprint has many advantages, not least the traffic you receive from it. But it is very effective at getting sites indexed quickly, and getting new web pages indexed quickly. This is an excellent way to leverage your time, unlikereciprocal linking . One article can get you links for months and years to come. By including a link in the resource box at the end of the article, you not only get a very topical link toyour site (assuming you wrote an article that was relevant to the page and site you are linking to), but you get interested visitors to your site. These visitors come from both the major article directories, and the sites that choose to publish your article.

How many people will republish your article depends very much on how topical your article is, how big the niche is, and of course, how good the article is. Writing fluff or rubbish will generally not serve you well. Few if anyone will republish it – assuming it is accepted by thearticle directories in the first place. And any visitors reading it will not be persuaded to click through to your site if you don’t provide good, relevant content. Article marketing is not just about getting a site indexed, or getting links from authorityarticle directories. These benefits are actually a consequence rather than an object in and of themselves.

Write to inform, write to solve a problem, write to contribute to people’s understanding. Don’t write for the search bots.

* Google Sitemaps

Google sitemaps is a great tool to reduce the amount of time it takes to get the googlebot back to your site when you’ve added fresh content. The search engines love fresh content. And the special sitemap you set up with google lets their bots know when a site has been updated. Pre sitemaps, the googlebot would have its own estimated schedule of whenyour site might be updated. In those ‘old days’, it might take a month for googlebot to crawl new pages.

* Press Releases

Whilst the idea of sending a press release sounds daunting, there is a lot of free information out there to make the process easier. Press release have to be formatted a certain way, and they must be written from the point of view of news. But they are great ways to get good links if you pay to have them released to yahoo news and google news. These can become a good source of traffic too, if they are optimized correctly. And whilst many webmasters now use article marketing, fewer use press releases.

Getting your site indexed quickly is all about getting one way, authority links into your new site. The major article directories are considered authority sites, and of course, so is yahoo and google news. And submitting your article to a lot of smaller article directories increases your chances of getting those articles republished. Those directories provide links themselves, but also a way of reaching a wider audience of webmasters looking for content. And the niche directories provide very relevant – and hence valuable – incoming links.