Saturday, December 5, 2009

How to increase traffic in 7 steps

Generating good traffic is essential to ensure your site or blog is kept alive: what's the purpose of a website if nobody wants to visit it? But even more, traffic is important if you wish to turn your site into a money making machine, that will ensure your company and products a large audience, and a larger amount of customers who will be more likely to buy your services or products; or - if your site is a blog - visitors will be more likely to become part of your very own social 'community' on the web.

Now, there are several ways to increase traffic, but for brevity sake, I'll only list the 7 most important ones, which I hope will help you get started with your business or blog.

1) Get advertised on websites and search engines. The first option is available to blogs, the second one is most recommended for online businesses. For instance, you could opt for Yahoo ads, or try out Google Adwords; if you have a blog, you can get free and paid advertising on other blogs and relevant websites; that way, visitors of the advertising site will more likely click on your link and visit your site / blog, and use your services in most cases. Relevance is the key: if your site / blog is about fashion clothes, make sure to advertise on fashion blogs and websites, and/or in the fashion related keywords on search engines.

2) Write and submit articles on article directories. Not just people who like your articles will willingly visit your website, but even when your articles get republished your link will be available for visitors of that site to reach yours. Definitely, article writing is a sure way to get quality visitors.

3) Make blog friends. For bloggers. It's the 'social link exchanging' (see point 1 too), which will benefit both your blog and the other, as visitors of one will be likely to visit the other site/blog as well. Relevant partners links are useful to business' site visitors as well.

4) Join forums and online communities. And put your site link in your signature. Everyone who takes part in your discussions is a potential visitor to your website.

5) If you have the time, setup a newsletter. Everyone who subscribes becomes a loyal daily or weekly visitors, and there's the possibility that each of your subscribers will invite friends to join too, thus your traffic rank would increase considerably.

6) Offer online services. Services attire visitors and backlinks, and they could make most of your traffic benefit. They might require some work, but results are almost guaranteed.

7) Setup a 'Tell A Friend' snippet. If your visitors like your articles, they'll be more likely to use this script and invite their friends to read.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Computer troubles

Looks like I have been a sort of lazy blogger again. Never mind. :) I still have something to share you readers, so let's get started.
I'm sure all of you Windows OS users at some point have experienced problems with your laptop or desktop computer: error messages popping up from nowhere, programs not working, software not installing and your computer that freezes while you're working... :( And these ones are just examples! To say the truth, all of this crap happened to me too a few months ago, and I had to fix the whole Windows registry to make my computer work again. Quite a hassle, isn't it? My computer registry classes were severely corrupted, and the keys and settings messed up. I used Regwork to fix it all, and looks like it worked. That is a free registry cleaner that scans a computer to find problems and fixes them automatically; it's a xp registry cleaner, but I think it works with Vista as well. Really, when the BIG troubles come up and we risk having to format the whole computer, better clean registry and get rid of the hassle. It's not fun. :(

Next SEO entry is coming tomorrow. ^^ Stay tuned!

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Again about Backlinks (and how to boost them)

I know I have posted about backlinks and techniques to gain more of them already, but since SEO is a subject that we keep learning day by day, no stop, it's good to add more to it and share it with my readership in the process.

So, there is basically a list of to-do that you should keep in mind as you work on your blog / site to make it more SEO friendly and backlink-attractive:

1- Make friends online! Link exchange with similar blog, with nice people who own a blog, with sites you're interested in. If you're loved, you'll be put on homepage, thus getting some good link juice as well.

2- Your blog is about cars? Do comment on automotive sites / blogs! Those are ALL relevant links to search engines' eyes ;) And read the following point too, now...

3- DO comment on Nofollow blogs! Who cares if you get a Nofollow backlink? It's STILL a backlink, dude! And it will boost up your Yahoo backlink rank pretty nicely.

4- Keep your content up to date! People will comment on your entries, and hopefully link back to you, and by any chance, RETURN their comments so that you leave a web trace on their blogs too. It works!

5- Have fun! Getting backlinks manually can be tiring and time-consuming, but if you live it as a hobby, and setup - say - 1 hour a day to dedicate specifically to it, you'll start to enjoy it and relax in the process. :)