Give your website’s traffic Nine Lives

Although some of you may think that promoting a blog is same as promoting a website, we – the bloggers, know the difference. Bloggers have more opportunities to promote, although this article will try to focus on “website” in a more general sense.
Sometime, when your website has little traffic, it is not necessarily because of bad SEO or poor promotion, sometimes it’s the small mistakes webmasters make while developing a site, which keep causing long-term damage. Here are some of the common mistakes and how to avoid them to maximize continuous traffic…

1. Keywords in URL’s. This means, the title of each page and the URL itself should contain some of the essential keywords which can potentially draw traffic from SE to your website. Blogs can easily modify the permalinks to titles, and webmasters of regular website should just give each file the appropriate name, for example “searchenginesoptimization.html” is better than “page273.html”, from Search Engines’ point of view.

2. Size (of other sites) does not matter. Don’t neglect small traffic generators; having said that, I do not advice you to buy massive links from small websites that send you a few visitors a day (although for some of you that is already a lot), but if you have an opportunity to get a link from a relatively small site with relevant theme, do not waste the opportunity. Don’t forget that any webmaster is dreaming to see his site getting recognition, and will do his best to promote it, so any link from a “small” site can potentially become a link from a “big” site, in a few months. Just have faith and hope other webmasters will do the job for you.

3. Size (of your site) matters. Yes, it’s good to have a big… website. You can brag, you can gain world’s domination… OK, serious now: the bigger is your website, the more potential it has. One hundred articles will naturally cover a wider variety of keywords and miscellaneous keywords “joints”, rather than one article. Also, it can potentially interest more visitors from different countries and cultures, as again – your guest is likely to find something interesting for himself after browsing one hundred topics, which may not happen if you only have a few measly articles.

4. Generosity, generosity, generosity. It’s a fact that websites who provide free content benifit from better traffic than websites who only sell products. Okay, count out sharks like Microsoft or Nokia. I am talking about average websites with average traffic and average abilities to get traffic, not someone who invests 100k $ a week on advertisement. What you will give away free – is up to you, just see what you can offer, but do it wisely. For example, if you offer a free template, script or other content that will get on other’s websites, add a link to your website which will be a requirement to keep. That won’t hold people from using your material, plus you can always offer a branding-free version for a fee. If you make tutorials, submit them to databases (read more about it in my Publishing your tutorials for maximum exposure article) and if you offer graphics (which is, by the way, not the best solution since they suck up on your bandwidth usage, cannot guarantee backlinks and have little use for SE) make sure you request a link back in case the graphics are used on other websites, but then again, from my personal experience I must say – you are lucky if one or two will do it. Even the biggest software companies always offer some product or tool for free, in hope you will upgrade or just help their promotion by visiting the site or advocating the good product. MSN messenger, Ad-Aware, ICQ and iTunes / Quicktime wouldn’t have been this popular if they were not free, and the result? – MSN messenger’s overview page is PR8 (same applies to Yahoo messneger), Ad-Aware’s website is PR7, ICQ download page is PR8 and… iTunes download page is PR10 (same as QuickTime, by the way)… So, inspired..?

5. Be popular. Traffic does not always come only from sponsored links and SE, another great tool to promote your site is forums. If your website is really unique and offers a great and helpful material, nothing can be better than sincere recommendation of your website to others, by forum members, when they ask for help or a helpful source of information. Don’t spam, just let people know about it and sooner or later the word of mouth will spread.

6. Blog special treatment. This advice only concerns blog owners. Did you know you can add your blog to Technorati, Digg, Del.icio.us and some other blog-oriented databases? …and if a big enough amount of visitors will “dig” your website or add it to Del.icio.us, you will start receiving some extra hits from PR8 websites… Not forgetting the feeds (preferably break the option of subscribing to Google, Yahoo, Bloglines, etc to separate URLs, for maximum usability). You will be pleasantly surprised how easily these feeds will be sending you traffic!

7. Make people WANT to link to you. This is the best advice I can give you, and is probably the only way to really give your website’s traffic 9 lives. This is hard, but not impossible and once achieved, you will be getting 2-3 new backlinks everyday, on different domains without promoting or paying for it. Try making your website truly unique, and when I say unique I refer to memorable design, unique (and highly valued) content, not yet another semi-dead webmasters forum. The site has to be frequently updates (and it’s important show the visitors in some way when was it last updated) in order to give reason to either come back or subscribe to your feeds. Ideally the content must be either of an educational nature (we all want to learn something… for free) or “interesting”, such as some news that cannot be read anywhere else, bring some updates that visitors won’t see on every other blog. I can give you a personal example on this. When I was making Photoshop tutorials to help and promote my forum and draw in more digital artists, I created a few ‘fantasy art tutorials’. Not because I was after making unique content, but because I usually work with PS and try to stick with dark / fantasy art, and this was just the only sphere, where I could teach others some techniques and tips. The result was stunning. Evidently, there were no fantasy art tutorials before, and they are in great demand. This very blog, for example, offer one Fantasy art tutorial and if you Google these keywords, it’s in top 10 results, out of 1,350,000 results. When these tutorials were published on my Photoshop forum – I was amazed at how willingly people link to my board from other forums, blogs, websites… Sincerely wishing to share with their audience a valued source of information. I am not saying you should start producing Fantasy art tutorials and step on my toes, no, be original, think of something you can do that will make people want to link to you. This technique, if successfully implemented, will provide continues traffic, because these won’t be links that expire; 100 will post links to you in different forums, recommending to visit your website. 1000 member will view it (say, 100 in each forum, assuming it’s a big board – can be even more). What if 1/3 of them will decide to spread the word and link to you from their blogs, sites, forums… This can become a daily routine, and in the end it will be a snow ball, rolling and growing bigger and bigger. Like I always say – first you work for your business company and sponsor it, and then your business company works for you and sponsors You.

Good luck!

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