Getting Traffic
January 18, 2007 by
Christoff Truter
SEO
I always struggle to get people to visit my site, i am sure a lot of people do as well.
My number one problem is obviously the fact that my site content is a bit sucky at
this stage, which wont be the case forever though.
But what must one do to get people to actually visit your little home on the web?
This is far from a complete list (will be adding to the list as time goes by, feel free to add to the list via comment) - just a few thoughts.
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Publish Quality Content - Content is king
The more content you have on your website the better - which means more stuff for google to index, more keywords leading to your website (a bit of a no brainer)
The "quality part" keeps people on your website.
-
Free Stuff
A great way to drive traffic that i found (context in this case being a programming site), is publishing free scripts on a site like
hotscripts, that alone
helped me to get about 26000 hits so far this month, which isnt bad, but i'd like to see
that figure times ten, once my site is worth the time and not simply a place to get a free
download or two.
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Link it up
Obviously you need to get linked on other websites, think of a link as a road - the more roads leading to your website the better.
It also influences your page rank, each link counts as a potential "vote", which helps you in getting top 10 listings in google/yahoo etc.
Unfortunately this "voting" process isn't very democratic in that all links are not equal under god (google), higher ranked sites count more towards the "equation".
So you might want to think about joining public forums/chats and commenting on other peoples blogs etc (including your links somewhere).
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Webrings
A bit of an old concept and didnt join a webring yet, but i am sure it will work, the concept makes sense e.g. joining a group of like-minded websites and sharing some traffic.
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Paid ads
Another thing I didnt do yet, but sure it will work, too broke to bother though...
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Social Networking
The last few years social networking had a massive impact on the world, this includes getting traffic to your website.
Think about Facebook and Google Plus, Twitter etc - all of these sites can potentially drive traffic to your site.
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SEO
Much of, if not most of the points mentioned above are some of the techniques used by SEO experts (Search Engine Optimization), now a lot of people pay SEO companies a lot of money to promote their websites.
But like in every field you do get your scam artists, so be VERY careful when choosing a SEO company, especially be careful of ones making a lot of promises (we'll get you number one spots on google, NOBODY can make that promise).
As programmer I am however more concerned about the technical part behind SEO, ask yourself can google properly index the markup generated by my source code?
I recently saw a website where the developer solely feeds all content to his pages via AJAX (terrible architecture), basically when a bot (like googlebot) hits his pages it only finds an empty shell (most bots cant handle JavaScript) - ends up that google cant index any of the pages.
You also get sites that promise you 1 Million visitors if you only pay them like $10, usually you visit their site through some dodgy link you found on google or
something
(something about free traffic, but once you get there its not).
Some want you to visit sites
(you dont want to visit) to generate
credits, to get visitors
(visitors being the same poor idiots doing what you're doing) - the
end of the day we visit places we dont want to visit, simply to get other people to visit places
they dont want to visit.
Sounds very scamy to me...
Incidentally clicking on that
hotscripts link in my blog will earn me referral points, which
will give my hotscripts downloads a bigger chance of being found - so click as much as you can as
fast as you can as often as you can :D... Dont be shy now, you know you want to.
Yes but January 18, 2007 by Brian S
Hi Christoff, Yes, users are clicking to earn credits for their account. But don't you stop and look at ads and sites that grab your attention and interest you? Most do. It's up to you to GRAB that interest and keep them at your site ... just as you have to do with ANY ad you place. People are busy ... you need to grab their interest right away or you lose them. Brian S. TrafficSwarm Support Team