How to Increase Website Traffic

• by Darcy Logan

Introduction

• You've created the perfect website. You've got it all set up. Now there is just one thing missing: traffic. In order to increase your website traffic, you need to do three very important things:
  1. Get people to come to your site.
  2. Get people to stay at your site.
  3. Get people to come back to your site.

• If you notice that your website traffic has become stagnate, you are probably messing up on one of those three things. Think of your site like a store. You can spend a lot of money advertising your store; but if people quickly leave or don't return, you'll go out of business pretty soon.

Tip 1: Content is Important

• There is an old saying in website design: content is king. Learning what makes for good website content will help draw traffic to your site.

Use Mahalo as Your Guide

• While we're talking about resources, you're looking at one of the best ones right now. No, not this article, but the site, Mahalo. Mahalo's purpose is to locate and link to quality sites. It focuses on learning what people are looking for and what makes a site popular.

• A good way to judge your site is to use the Mahalo Publishers Guide. You should also read "What sites will I find / not find on Mahalo?" on Mahalo FAQ. This suggestion is because Mahalo has simplified the task of finding good sites with unique content and stakes its reputation on finding the websites people want to visit.

Website Writing

• Learning how to write for a website will help make your site more attractive to visitors. Crawford Kilian's Writing for Websites gives several tips for writing a good quality web page. These tips include:

1. Be concise.
2. Keep paragraphs short.
3. Use headings and subheadings.
4. Keep it simple.¹

• You should also keep in mind why people are coming to your site. Web Pages That Suck gives four basic reasons someone goes to a website: to find information, make a purchase, find entertainment, or connect with others.² Each web page you create should be designed to fill one of those needs.

Link Baiting

• Link baiting is the art of attracting links by creating unique and popular content. Think of it like fishing.³ Instead of hunting down visitors, you are going to lure them to you. In order to create an article that is considered "link bait" you need to have a hook. This hook can be humorous, argumentative, attacking, newsworthy or resourceful.⁴

Tip 2: Blog

• One of the best ways to add new content to your webpage is to start a blog. Blogging is a quick and easy way to add new content to an established website. Once you have established your blog, you will need to do a couple of things to help you generate traffic to it.

1. Post regularly and often. This will help you establish regular visitors. However, quality is better than quantity.⁵
2. Optimize your blog for Technorati. You can find out how on Technorati's page Using Technorati Tags.⁶
3. Sign up for MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog, which is now a part of Yahoo!, allows you to track what people find interesting on your blog.
4. Add widgets so people can bookmark and vote for your blog on Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us and similar sites.

• • Visit Mahalo's How to Set Up a Blog for Beginners for additional information.

Tip 3: Learn and Use Search Engine Optimization

• Search engine optimization, or SEO, are ways to optimize your website to help increase the rank search engines, such as Google, gives it. The higher your website is ranked, the sooner it will appear in search results.

• If you are unfamiliar with SEO techniques, check out Mahalo's page on How to SEO Your Website. The techniques listed there are valuable. Implementing them will help increase the chances that the other techniques listed here will help improve your website traffic.

• Of course, one of the problems beginners have with SEO is that they forget why they are writing the website in the first place—the people. While SEO is good for tweaking your content, it should never be the focus of it. Write for people, not search engines.

• You should make a point to avoid black hat techniques. Black hat techniques are deceptive practices designed to try to trick the search engines into giving the site a higher ranking than it deserves. However, search engines have been striking back by banning sites that use the techniques or ranking sites that use these techniques lower.⁷

• • Visit Mahalo's How to SEO Your Website and How to Use Google Analytics for Beginners for additional information.

Tip 4: Exchange Quality Links

• Link exchanging, or trading links with other websites, used to be one of the best ways to increase your search engine ranking. But more recently, link exchanging has become abused and overused. Google has started to devalue some link exchanges as a true method of determining a site's value, or what they call link schemes.⁸ Only exchange links with sites that are related to yours.

• Connected with this idea is something called blog spam. Blog spam is when people leave meaningless comments in response to someone's blog post.⁹ Usually, this includes adding a link to their page in the hopes that it will increase their search engine rating. Most sites have developed methods to combat this technique, so it is best not to bother with it. Besides, if your site is good enough, you shouldn't need to do it in the first place.

Tip 5: Advertise

• You should advertise your website as many places as you can, both on and off the Internet. Try advertising off-line with television and radio ads, business cards, flyers, trade shows and trade magazines, or newsletters.^{10 11}

• You can also advertise online using Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Microsoft ContentAds, Adknowledge or similar site. You typically pay a fee for every click you receive on advertisements placed around the Internet by these companies. The cost will depend on how popular your target words are.

Tip 6: Network

• Network on the Internet by joining a discussion group or forum.¹² Often times, you can include your link in your signature, which makes every post an advertisement for your site. However, in order for this to be successful, you need to follow some basic guidelines.

1. Read the rules for the group.
2. Participate with relative content.
3. Your first post should NOT be about your site.

• The following sites are some good places to start looking for a relevant group or forum:

1. Google Groups
2. Yahoo! Groups
3. Microsoft Discussion Groups
4. phpBB

Tip 7: Socialize

• The Internet is a great place to make friends and socialize. The idea is to make friends who then connect you up with their friends. As your friendships grow, people will want to check you out and end up coming to your website. Start connecting by joining one or more of the following sites: Mahalo Social, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and FriendFeed. Once you join, make sure you place information about your website on your profile page.

• YouTube: Facebook Secrets Increase Website Traffic With Facebook.com (Time: 4:46)

• • Visit Mahalo's How to Make Friends Online, How to Customize Your MySpace Profile, How to Use FriendFeed, How to Use Mahalo Social and How to Use Twitter for additional information.

Tip 8: Use Social Bookmarking

• Social bookmarking sites are places where you can bookmark and your favorite links. They are also a great place to link to your site.¹³ It has become so popular, that Yahoo! has started to focus its energy on it.¹⁴ The trick is not to simply join and link to your site, but to link to other sites as well. Members look for similar sites by checking the bookmarks of people who have linked to it. Some popular social bookmarking sites include:

Mahalo Del.icio.us StumbleUpon Reddit

Propeller Ma.gnolia Furl

Newsvine AddThis Faves

Mixx OnlyWire SocialMarker

• Don't forget to make it simple for people to bookmark to your site by adding the appropriate widgets for each site.

• • Visit Mahalo's How to Use Mahalo Social, How to Use del.icio.us Like a Pro and How to Use StumbleUpon Like a Pro for additional information.

Tip 9: Use Social News Web Sites

• Social news web sites allow you to read, submit and vote on content submitted by other users. Some good examples of these sites are Digg, Yahoo! Buzz and Propeller. Digg is a good place to start; if you are unfamiliar with it, check out Mahalo's page on How to Use Digg Like a Pro. If you submit content that is current and has a catchy title, you have a good chance of catching a reader's eye and getting more votes.¹⁵ The more positive votes your site gets, the higher it is ranked and more visitors you will get. ¹⁶
  • Visit Mahalo's How to Use Digg Like a Pro for additional information.

Tip 10: Create a Podcast

• A podcast is a like a short radio show. It gives you a forum to talk about your ideas and knowledge. Creating a podcast is fairly simple and inexpensive. It is also a great way to increase your website traffic.¹⁷
  • Visit Mahalo's How to Make a Podcast and How to Make a Video Podcast for additional information.

Tip 11: Post a Video

• Posting a video that advertises your website is one of the better ways to popularize it.¹⁸ Most people know about YouTube, but it's not the only video site out there. If you can construct a good how-to video, post it on to Howcast, VideoJug, 5min, helpfulvide.com, Koonji, MonkeySee, Sclipo, SuTree, TeacherTube, ViewDo, WonderHowTo and Instructables. When you create your video, make sure you do the following:

1. Don't pirate video, images, or music.
2. Do include your website address at the beginning and end of the video.
3. Make it entertaining or informative.

• • Visit Mahalo's How to Use YouTube Like a Pro and How to Make a Video Podcast for additional information.

Conclusion

• This page contains a sampling of the hundreds ways you can increase your website traffic. The important thing is that you start trying different methods until you find what works for your website. Being creative and unique while focusing on whom you're trying to attract is the key to having a successful website.

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References for How to Increase Website Traffic

1. ↑ Writing for the Web: Writing for Websites  
2. ↑ Web Pages that Suck: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015  
3. ↑ Search Engine Journal: Link Baiting & Effective Link Building (January 19, 2006)
4. ↑ Performancing: The Art of Linkbaiting (May 18, 2005)
5. ↑ V7 Network Blog: Blog Posting Frequency: Less Is More? (June 13, 2006)
6. ↑ Technorati: Using Technorati Tags
7. ↑ Empowered SEO Blog Top Black Hat SEO Techniques
8. ↑ Google: Link Schemes
9. ↑ Wikipedia: Blog Spam
10. ↑ About.com: Top 10 "Secret" Ways to Increase Your Web Traffic
11. ↑ AddMe!: How to Advertise Your Web Site
12. ↑ Performancing: 3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic (July 26, 2006)
13. ↑ dlperry.com How to Increase Website Traffic
14. ↑ SiteProNews: Social Bookmarking for Traffic
15. ↑ Pronet Advertising: Using Digg and Netscape to get Traffic
16. ↑ Slate Magazine: Using Digg, a people-powered news aggregator, to attract hits (June 30, 2006)  
17. ↑ WebMarketCentral: How to Build Site Traffic with Compelling Content
18. ↑ Buzzle: The Art of Creating YouTube Free Website Traffic

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