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How do I get more traffic to my site?

articles@doublespark.

articles@doublespark.co.uk.

Best regards

Gary Mattoc
http://www.doublespark.co.uk/

How do I get more traffic to my site?
On the Internet, by the end of the day, it's all about
traffic, and more so, it's all about relevant traffic.
Relevant traffic is the lifeline of your online presence
and you need to make a continuous effort to keep getting
good traffic to your website. Now, you can get targeted
traffic from:

* The search engines: The search engines are the primary
source of your relevant traffic, in most of the cases. It
doesn't cost you tons of money to get traffic from the
search engines. Millions of users conduct billions of
searches every month.

* Pay-per-click programs: They are not as hot as the search
engines but they are your way to instant targeted traffic.
Sign up for a pay-per-click program like AdWords and you'll
be getting traffic within fifteen minutes. Pay-per-click
advertising options are present on independent content
publishing websites too.

* Inbound links from other websites: If you publish
compelling content then many website owners put your link
on their websites to add value to their existing content.
Such links can be put their voluntarily, or through link
exchange. Link exchange is discouraged these days, so the
best way of making others link to you is to produce
high-class, linkable content, on a regular basis. You can
even interact on various online forums to increase your
link visibility.

* Emails: Up till a few years ago email marketing was
considered the most effective advertising tool the world
had ever witnessed. Spam killed its charm but in some
quarters it still performs well, especially the opt-in
email newsletters. Email advertising campaigns, provided
they are done properly, are still the best way of getting
highly targeted traffic.

* Blogs and RSS Feeds: Only the most ignorant can discount
blogs and RSS feeds as highly productive tools in terms of
generating targeted traffic. Blogs are a constant source of
quality information and hence they get instant traffic from
other websites and the search engines. RSS feeds, without
being intrusive like emails, instantly notify people
whenever you publish something new on your blog or website.

* Social media and bookmarking websites: Some of such
websites are: Digg, Netscape, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

* Offline sources: If you prominently display your URL on
your visiting cards, letter heads, brochures and other
stationery you can get some good traffic from there too. I
have seen people printing their URLs even on their T-shirts
and vehicles.

In order to get traffic from all these sources, you have to
take care how you create your website and how you organize
your content. Given below are a few things you should
constantly keep in mind while creating and maintaining your
website, and while writing content for your website.

Stick to your central theme as much as possible; The more
you stick to your central theme, the more expert content
you'll have. Don't try to create content for every interest
under the sun (or the moon, or the stars). Think vertical
if you want to get high-value traffic. Cover all the topics
that belong to your central theme. It acts like fodder to
the search engines. The search engines love specialized
content; give it to them and they'll give you loads of
traffic in exchange.

Sticking to your central theme also earns you great respect
and loyalty, and also hundreds of inbound links. When you
keep generating content on your subject, people take you as
an expert and linking to you becomes a prestige factor. It
also increases your keyword-density across your domain.

Provide information that helps your visitors; This is what
keeps them coming back to your website. You cannot always
be selling this thing or that thing. More than that,
develop a bond with your visitors. Show them their
happiness matters to you. Make your website a resource of
useful information. Publish content that adds value. This
is a sure-shot way of increasing traffic as well as
loyalty. Information that provides help, for instance,
how-to articles, get linked to a lot by other web masters
and blog publishers, and this leads to higher rankings on
various search engines.

Conduct a thorough keyword research before generating
content; Most SEO campaigns fail to zero-in on the right
keywords. You'll be surprised to know what all keywords and
key expressions people use to find businesses such as
yours. Target a few wrong keywords and you can bid good bye
to an effort of six months of SEO. It's not always
necessary to use keywords that your competitors are using.
First of all, they might themselves be optimizing for the
wrong keywords, and second, there might be a slew of
keywords that are being used by the users but are being
ignored by your competitors. Use your keyword research to
find out such keywords and optimize your web pages for
them. This will increase your traffic manifolds.

Create a simple, accessible but elegant design; When you
create fast-loading, elegant and accessible web design you
accommodate the entire Diaspora of your prospective market
-- you don't exclude particular sections of the society.
Even search engines prefer accessible websites because
almost all accessible websites conform to the W3C web
designing standards. Good design also means using the right
colors (that cause no eye-strain) and right contrasts to
assist seamless browsing. The navigation bar should be
designed in such a manner that all your important pages
should be reachable within 2-3 clicks. A well-defines
sitemap of all your pages help your human visitors as well
the search engine crawlers.

Do well-organised onsite optimisation; Onsite optimization
means using your keywords at all the right places like
within the header tags (...>), as anchor text (, and especially in the
navigation) and with the bulleted lists ( and ).
Also, try to highlight the occurrence of the keywords here
and there, but don't overdo it. Although this is not
necessary, use the keyword at least once in every paragraph.

Create a title (the text that comes between
) that not only carries your keywords, but
also represents the true highlight of your page content.
Never try to deceive your visitors with a title that does
not completely represent the content of your page. Your
title shows up on the search engine results pages when your
link appears on them. A compelling title makes people click
it, and having those keywords in your title that people are
looking for increases their probability of being clicked.

Regularly create new, relevant content; People come to your
website again and again if they are expecting something new
there. Similarly, the search engines index and re-index
your pages with greater frequency if you update your
website regularly. Having many pages increases your chance
of at least few of them getting ranked higher by the search
engines.

Remain active on the Internet; Known people get more
traffic on the Internet. Keep the buzz alive by maintaining
an active blog, participating in the comments sections of
other blogs and various subject-specific online forums.
Blogs are a great way of getting high-quality traffic both
from the search engines and from other blogs and websites.
If you continuously generate quality posts and encourage
productive conversations on your blog more and more people
gradually start coming to your blog and some of that
traffic gets spilled over to your actual business website.
Another benefit of maintaining a popular blog is that if
you put your business website link their it gets extra
point when the search engines rank your website.

Link to others; Link to them and they'll link to you.
Linking on the Internet is a two-way activity especially if
you are not a celebrity (if you are a celebrity people link
to you anyway). If you select the outgoing links with
caution it also tells the search engines that you link to
quality information sources. People who are looking for
such links will visit your website repeatedly knowing that
you constantly add new links.

More often than not people to whom you link, link back to
you.

Well, I could have written a 101 Ways of Increasing Traffic
To Your Website but my main purpose was to give you exactly
the pointers you can use to increase traffic. Follow the
steps mentioned above and you'll definitely notice a surge
in your online traffic.

----------------------------------------------------
Author: Gary Mattoc
http://www.doublespark.co.uk

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