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Friday, January 28, 2011

The Complete Guide to Getting Traffic on Your Site (in progress)

This posting will be updated regularly as I learn more and more on getting traffic.  I have learned a bunch of things so far and have forgotten half of it.  So this post is for me to remember what I learned.  Much of these methods involve something called "backlinking".  It's basically commenting/posting on another website and having a link back to the site you want people to go to.  It's a relatively simple concept and something that everyone wanting traffic should be trying to do.


Join Social Networking Sites
Joining sites like twitter and facebook will definitely help spread the word about your site.  If the content isn't good though, it may only reach as far as you're furthest friend.


Posting on Facebook:
 When posting on facebook and you want everyone to know about your post, you can click on the lock and choose to share with "Everyone".
Posting on Twitter:
Twitter already posts to everyone.  I find that it is better if I post links back to my blog using the full URL rather than a shortened one.


Submit to Directories
An easy way to get backlinks to your website is by submitting them to directories.  This is like putting your phone number in the phone book.  It's fast, effective, and best of all, FREE.  Google and Yahoo are the obvious choices when submitting to a directory, but did you know there were more?  There's a seemingly infinite number of directories out there.  This website lists the top 100 directories along with their google page rank: http://www.tipsntutorials.com/Top-Directories/.
Other sites include:



I found a tool that can submit your website to directories almost automatically.  It basically lets you enter all the information in one place and submits them to their list of directories.  It prompts you to enter the category and captha word if needed.  This tool needs to be set up on a web server, please contact the developers on the page if you need help setting it up (I am not associated with them):  http://www.seopanel.in/


Posting Comments
No, I'm not talking about spamming.  Posting legitimate comments on pages with a similar topic will help support your online presence.  Many times you can put your site URL in your profile and have your name link back to your site.  You don't need to paste a link inside your comment to get traffic.  Posting interesting comments may get readers to wonder who you are and what your website is.

An interesting article at Daily Tech shows how you can search for websites that allow comments.  In Google, you can search for urls with specific attributes and also look for comments.  For example:

site:.com inurl:blog + “post a comment” + Keyword

Since it's pretty hard to promote something without your comment
looking like spam, I modified the search query they gave and came up
with these two:

site:.com inurl:money + “post a comment” + url

site:.com inurl:money + “post a comment” + website

Basically these two searches search for any websites with ".com" and
"money" in the url. The next two items are keyword searches. So it
looks for those words on the page. I added "url" and "website"
because when the comments allow you to put in your website, they
usually use those terms.
As you can see, from the first search, the first hit is this website:
http://www.bethkobliner.com/beths-blog/2011/2/3/this-week-on-slate-our-newlywed-money-dilemma.html
That website allows you to enter in your website and then post a comment. So you can just comment on the article even if it's not about your specific topic.  You can be a interested person commenting on the blog and have your website as a link in your name at the same time.

Just a warning if you are trying to post comments for backlinking, Google does not value links in the comments as much as it does in the actual post.  Also some comments add an attribute called "no follow" to their links.  This attribute causes search engines to not count the link in your comment as a link to your website as noted here

Get another Blog
Two blogs are better than one.  One blog linking back to another blog is even better.  It's called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Search engines look for links linking to another blog.  The more links you get linking to your blog, the better rank your website is.  You can also just do random postings on other blogs or websites.  Here are a few websites that I have posted on:
Squidoo.com
http://www.squidoo.com/magic-shoelaces
http://www.squidoo.com/superbowl-food-statistics
http://www.mymonkeydo.com


Digg
Digg is a site that lets you "Digg" or like a website.  The more people like the same website, the more exposure it gets.  Digg your website and others...  Follow people in hopes that they will follow you back... Then when you Digg a website, your followers will see what you digg.  Reddit is another site that is similar to Digg.  Reddit seems to be more popular than Digg now.

Free Advertisement
This one doesn't get you much traffic, but any exposure is good.  If you see a computer in a store with access to the internet and open to use, go on the computer and navigate to your website.  Once there you can leave it on your blog for the next person to see.  Also if you want, you can set the home page, add it as a bookmark or shortcut, etc.  I wouldn't overdo it though as it will start to look like spam.


Also trying these out:
Technorati
Reddit
Making your own blog ring

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