Thursday, June 12, 2008

4 Methods That Increase Website Traffic

By Kurt Schmitt

There are many methods that work to increase website traffic. Unfortunately, a number of the techniques being promoted are known as "black hat" and will either ultimately get you in trouble, or will only work for a very short period of time. Since you want your Web business to be around for a long time, it might be a better move to spend your time on something more lasting.

Some of these tricks will work, but I'd like to discuss several "white hat" methods that result in lasting traffic. They're not exciting, and they're not kept under lock and key by any guru, but they're being used successfully by many webmasters. In fact, it's a way to future-proof your Web business. These methods will work to produce free traffic for any site you choose for many months and years to come.

Article marketing -- Using article marketing to increase website traffic offers several major benefits. The article marketing sites themselves often have high authority with Google and offer excellent backlinks, which can drive up your search engine rankings. In addition, because of the authority that these sites have, your posted articles will often rank high in the engines.

The article directories can send you direct traffic. This traffic is normally very targeted delivering visitors who already trust you and are often warm to becoming loyal visitors and customers. Once your article is published, other websites will republish your article with your backlink. Your job is done as soon as you publish, yet the viral effect created by republishing can live on for years. You can continue to get new backlinks without any further effort.

Making your site delicious -- The best social bookmark is one you don't have to do yourself. You can encourage your visitors to bookmark your pages by placing icons on your site with links to popular social bookmarking sites (such as addthis.com). Bookmarking can dramatically increase the backlinks to your site with minimal effort. In addition, if you bookmark other sites that link to yours, you can improve your rankings in the search engines.

Creating content -- The more pages you have on your site, the more PageRank your site can accumulate. A higher PageRank value for your site will get your site spidered more often, keeping more of your pages in Google's index. It also adds to your site's overall authority. More pages also equates to more value for your visitor, more keywords for the search engines to chew on, and additional internal linking opportunities. All of this results in an increase in website traffic. Building a large content site is not only a proven Web business model with staying power, but also adds real value.

Social media and community sites -- Many people think of Reddit and Digg, but forget about repurposing their content on other social media sites. Instead of trying to play the very difficult game of who's going to Digg me, you should look at user generated content sites that allow you to post a link to your site. Start with the biggest ones first, as they offer great backlinks and the potential for high traffic. These include Hubpages, Squidoo, and Buzzle, as well as a number of up and coming community sites published on the Ning platform and others like Tumblr.

Increasing website traffic with these methods will produce lasting results, as opposed to some of the risky, flash-in-the-pan methods that so many are suggesting these days. Start incorporating one or more of these techniques, and you're sure to see an increase in visitor count.

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