Article Advise

submitted: Jun 14th 2008 | by: KurtSchmitt | Total views: 2 | Word Count: 607 | |

If you've purchased any "how to increase website traffic" ebooks lately, you may have been more than disappointed. Often, the techniques are either not feasible, or they fall under the "black hat" category. A number of marketers have also taken to hyping up their informational products to the point of combining unrealistic expectations with such a lack of detail that your money is probably better spent on the slot machines.

While the tricks might work for a while, I'd like to talk about some "white hat" methods that result in lasting traffic. They may not be sexy, and they aren't "secrets" or anything mysterious, but they work. In fact, these methods will work to produce free traffic for many months and years to come.

Article marketing -- There are a number of benefits to using article marketing and other than building pages, it's the number one method I use to increase website traffic. If written correctly, your posted articles will often rank high in the engines and you can end up with several top listings. The article directory sites have a lot of trust and authority with Google, and provide an excellent backlink to your site.

The high profile article sites create a viral effect and other website owners will pick up your articles and publish them. This increases your reach and your backlinks. On top of that, when people read your article and then decide to click through to your site, they're showing enough confidence in your content to want to read more. These are pre-sold visitors.

Social bookmarking -- Social bookmarking is an activity that can have great rewards for your site. It's easy to create a number of links back to your sites by social bookmarking a few pages. You can also encourage your visitors to do this for you by placing icons with links to popular social bookmarking sites. In addition, you can increase traffic to your own websites by bookmarking sites that link to yours.

Building content -- When in doubt, build more content. More pages on your site equate to more PageRank, more opportunities for adding in keywords that the search engines will pick up on, more pages to link to, and more information for your visitors. All of this adds up to increasing website traffic. I own a domain name because someone built an online store at the same time I was building a content site on the same subject, with almost the same name. The store is gone, my content site is still there, and I own that former online store's domain name.

Social media sites -- Placing your content on other sites is what I call a web-centric approach to success. Many people know about using Digg and Reddit to drive large amounts of traffic, but this is very hit or miss. Others are using Facebook but that is tricky as well. I'm not saying not to use those sites, but a better way to spend the majority of your time might be to use the user generated content sites. Looking at some of the most popular ones, Squidoo, Buzzle, and Hubpages come to mind. There are also a number of up and coming niche related community sites published on the Ning platform and others. All of these let you create valuable backlinks to your site in some way.

These are not the only effective white hat methods to increase website traffic, but they certainly work to produce lasting results with no risk. Individually they work well, and in combination they're even more powerful. So forget about those short-lived techniques that might get you banned, and increase your visitor count with these long term strategies.

About the Author

Author Kurt Schmitt writes about more ways to increase website traffic using article marketing and other techniques. Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory

Comments

No comments posted.

You do not have permission to comment. If you log in, you may be able to comment.