How to increase traffic

Friday, 26 February 2010

The most important purpose of SEO is for your site to be visible to search engines, resulting in higher placement in search results and subsequently to more traffic to your website. More visitors, especially more buyers are the ultimate objective of any site promotion. To be completely honest, SEO is just way to promote your website and amplify traffic, as there are numerous other ways - both online and offline – to receive high traffic and to get to your targeted market. This tutorial is not about these ways, but remember that there are other ways beside search engines to get a high number of visitors to your website; nevertheless, search engines are preferred and it is quite an easy way to follow.

Submitting Your Website to Search Directories, forums and special sites

Following the optimization of your website the next step is to submitting it to search engines. Usually, there is nothing special you could do for search engines to include your site in their index, as they will find you. It cannot be predicted when they will visit your website for the first time or the periodicity of the later visits, but anyway you can’t invite them to pay a visit to your site. Of course, you might submit the URL of your site at their Submit a Website section but that will guarantee an immediate or quicker response & action. Plus, even in case of submitted URLs, the majority of search engines reserve the right to decide if they are going to crawl your site or not. This is where you can submit your URLs in the three main search engines: Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

Beside search engines you might want to include your website in search directories as well. Search directories record websites relevant to a specific topic, but they differ from search engines in various aspects. To start with, search directories are managed by humans and the listed sited are first reviewed for relevancy as they were submitted. Search directories do not crawl the Web for URLs, it is you who have to visit them and submit your website. However, once your site is listed in the directory, it stays there permanently without requiring any future effort from your part. Two of the most popular and valuable search directories are DMOZ and YAHOO! – Yahoo, the directory and not the Yahoo search engine – and here where you can submit your website to them: DMOZ and Yahoo!.

Posting your site’s link in the proper forums or other special places might result in an increased traffic to your website. You have to find the most important forums in your area of interest, but that will not be difficult, as their names will be listed after performing a simple search in Google or any other main search engine. For example, if you are a basketball fan, type “basketball forum” in the search box and within a second the list of favorite sites of other basketball fans will be displayed. Go through the list of sites one by one, as not all of them allow you to post links to any commercial sites. It is important to keep in mind that forum posting is quite time-consuming and does require a higher effort than with search engines, but the results might be rewarding as well.

Specialized Search Engines

There are other search engines out there beside Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Some of them are general-purpose search engines while others are specialized search engines that might help you get to your targeted audience. There is a huge number of niche specialized search engines, from art to movies, or educational ones. Some of these are nothing but enormous sites with Web resources on a certain topic and most of them have a section where you can submit your site to them. So, start with finding the specialized search engines for your niche than visit the site and submit your URL. This action might be more valuable in terms of traffic than desperately trying to get a top ranking in Google.

Paid Ads and Submissions

As we already discussed it, there are also other options for you beside search engines - such as forums, specialized search engines and sites, search directories – but to ensure your site will be definitely noticed, you can use the paid ads and submissions. Paid listings are the quickest and most effective ways your site to appear in search results. Most search engines accept payment in return of your URL placed in the Paid Links area for the selected keywords, but remember that users are usually skeptical with paid links. With paid links it is like you are paying off the search engine to give you a top placement which is normally inaccessible for you with your own efforts, so you need to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of paid listings.