SiteProNews

In today’s highly competitive online world, the importance of attracting highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be overemphasized. Directing web traffic to your site can be your only means of survival. Getting a high search engine ranking can be very difficult though fortunately, there is plethora of website promotion strategies you can use to drive traffic to your website.

There is a wide variety of strategies you can adapt to drive traffic to your website, from advertising to affiliate marketing. However, most of these techniques require some form of payment. However, there are ways to promote your website and increase your web traffic without spending anything. Writing articles is one of the best web site promotion strategies you can use, and they can be very effective. How, you may ask, can writing articles help improve your web traffic?

Here are the top six ways in which it can help explode your website traffic.

1.Larger potential audience

When you write good articles, it is a disservice to you and your website not to share them with other people. You can post your articles in your website or you can submit them to other sites such as e-zines and online publishers. By submitting your articles to these sites, you give exposure not only to your ideas but also to your website and thus increasing website traffic. Simply include a link back to your site or include your information in the resource box. With this, you get exposure and free advertising as well. Submit your articles to popular e-zines and take advantage of their popularity. Other sites who find your article relevant may also link back to you. Thus, you increase your link popularity, which is one of the most important strategies in the internet world for high webpage ranking and more website traffic. Remember that most people are looking for information online and by filling this need with your quality article, you may reap the benefit of more exposure and thus higher web traffic.

2.Free Advertising

By submitting your articles to other websites presents an opportunity to advertise your website without paying fees and increase your website traffic. Although you should avoid marketing language in your articles and make it informative and useful to your readers, you can always include your site’s link in the resource box. In addition, by making your article relevant and helpful to your readers, you are making a good impression for your website, which could ultimately lead to a visit to your website and hopefully a purchase. Good quality content in an article is far better and more effective than a few lines of ad space. You have a very special opportunity to presell your product or service to your prospective customer.

3.Gain High Search Engine Ranking

Another easy and free method of gaining website traffic is to create a new web page for your article in your website. Optimize your article to make it search-engine friendly. Use top-ranked keywords and Meta tags that can give your website a high search engine ranking. As soon as you upload your new webpage to your server, search engines will spider through it and you can gain an increase in search engine ranking. Remember that search engine optimized content is a very effective strategy to gain a high ranking in search results.Relevance and quality is still the most important things to consider when writing articles and it will be doubly useful to your site if you make these articles search-engine optimized.

4.Increase Link Popularity

Instead of looking for other sites who would want to establish reciprocal links with your website, you can simply submit an article to other sites. Just do not forget to include a link to your site in your resource box. When these websites pick up and publishes your article, you automatically get a link partner. Try to get as many link partners as you can. Link popularity is one of the factors used by search engines in determining search engine rankings.Higher search engine rankings will most definately lead to higher website traffic for you. Make your article especially useful and appealing, so that more websites will be encouraged to publish it.

5.Establish a Good Impression and Reputation

By writing excellent, original and relevant articles, you not only give your site exposure and increase traffic, you are also creating a good impression on your prospects. Encourage more people to visit your site and do business with you by establishing an impressive reputation through your articles. Be seen as an expert in the field and your will ultimately gain more customers eager to do business with you.

6.Enhance your credibility through references and testimonies

Certainly, your articles are going to receive feedbacks and testimonies when you publish them in e-zines and free article sites. Record these positive feedbacks and comments and use them as promotional material in your website or in any of your advertising efforts. Your credibility will be greatly enhanced by these feedbacks, as it will create a good impression on your prospects as well as your existing customers. In this highly competitive world, excellent credibility and trust may be the only things you need to attract new customers or make loyal patrons out of your existing customers. Original, relevant, useful and pertinent articles are important tools you should utilize to improve and explode the amount of traffic that visits your website and ultimately becomes your customers.

---

Michael Tasker started his information product business last year and it has now expanded to various websites plus direct marketing channels as well. He learned by utilising the extensive quality references that he sourced plus following the advice of those that had already succeeded. He was mentored as anyone who has ambitions to succeed with online marketing should be. Simply put, he followed a tried and tested formula that others had used to succeed. www.yourworkathomejob.com

Tags: article writing, increase website traffic

As a web designer what should you know in order to build a search engine friendly website, what points you need to cover and what tools you need to use.

First let’s all agree that we professional web designers do write good semantic markup and not the old fashion table based designs. This is something essential, why? Because search engines are just like people, they don’t like to read a lot of unnecessary markup and get board quickly that they might leave your website before they crawl it all. They also can’t determine which part of the markup is important and which is not such as lists, menu or titles.
That’s why you should make sure that you are inserting the right markup in the right place. I’m not saying that writing the semantic markup will boost up your traffic and put you at the top of the SERPs but it will make crawling and understanding of your website much easier.

Now how do we make the search engine spider while visiting our website knows the good pieces of that site? That’s very simple and we will come to it.

Header

Let’s start our journey; what you need to do first is to add the regular Meta data at the top of your HTML header, title tag followed by keywords tag, and finally the description tag - in this order; then you can attach JavaScript’s and CSS files. Why? Because search engines will read these pieces of information the first thing, so if they are at the top you will make their life much easier.

Please note that every page has its own unique Meta data, so don’t duplicate the Meta data and use it on every page of your website.
Footer, the power

Let’s tackle something else, let’s talk about the footer. Footer where you add the copyrights and some other links is a good place for another navigational element using your keywords listed in <UL> as you did with the navigation above.

This is not spamming and we are not stuffing the page with tones of unnecessary links, for some websites this could be very good especially if your website have long pages, so when users reach the end of the page (if they did scroll) they will find another navigational assistant.

Your body, the gold mine

Now, let’s go to the next part of your exercise, it’s the body; the base of all the good information that search engines are crawling to find.

In the body of your HTML make sure to start your markup with the menu or your navigation DIV and give it an ID call it navigation or menu or whatever you want to call it, by this the first thing search engine finds when it comes to the body is the navigation where usually your most important keywords are listed there.

Put these navigational elements in a list <UL> because that’s what they are; and each one of them are titled with a description of its function. By this; search engine can crawl your whole website (Make sure that your navigation is consistent and exist in every page of your website, this is purely usability issue).
Note: If you are using flash, images, or JavaScript’s navigation then you better stop that as they are unrecognized by search engines and not accessible or usable at the same time.
Now you have built your navigation with links of your most important keywords and told the search engine that these are important items (as they are listed at the top of your body tag and are built as links, and each has its title attribute). Isn’t that’s fun and simple?

Note: adding the navigation at the top of your body tag doesn’t mean that it will appear at the top of the page, with CSS you can control that and float it to the right or left on your page.

Now we’ve covered two of the website parts, lets’ now dive in the most important part of your page. The content part where all the good stuff could be found (assuming you are building a good website that can benefit the mankind).
Since this part of the website is totally different from website to another and from webpage and the other even in the same website, so I will give general recommendations.
First start your content area with breadcrumb, breadcrumb is something very important for every website, it tells the users where they are, and it’s a good place to add your keywords to it with descriptive title attributes.
Breadcrumbs are supposed to be at the top of the content area and, they are the first thing a search engine read when crawling this area.

Second add to your content area the most important keywords as heading for that part, use <H1><H2><H3> for that. By this search engine spider will understand that you are pointing it to an important area of your website. The idea is to use the appropriate markup to present your content.

Note: it’s not recommended to stuff your page with keywords and links, so use them wise and carefully or it will turn on you. What is good for users is good for search engine spiders as well. Search engines are tools people use them to reach their goals.

As a web designer you can control the placement for each element inside that area and according to it’s impotence you can take it upper from the markup side.
Your recommendation for the layout is very important in this stage, that’s why you should have a strong understanding of the nature of every page in the website and every section.
Connectable

Try to make your pages reachable by two to three clicks and are connected to each other where I can reach the first page from the third one and vise versus. You also want to decrease the links to external pages, so avoid elements as much as you can that are pointing to other website (this is differ from website to another depending on their nature and objective).
While we are talking about links; put into your mind to limit your page links to 100 according to Google recommendations.

Always use title tag and link attributes for your images and links, this is very good place to add extra keywords (but don’t use this to spam the spiders).

File size is considerable

While building your page always remember light is good, so try to avoid 200KB websites and try to limit your self with 30 to 40 KB with higher text to code ratio.
Rich Internet Application

Try to avoid adding your content that has your most important keywords inside flash, JavaScript’s, AJAX or images. Don’t hide that valuable content from the search engine spiders. Always remember that building a website is for professional and you are that one, your recommendations should be for the client and the user benefit.

Let’s sum it up

I think by this I’ve reached the end of the story on how should you as a professional web designer build your website, what are the good elements and how to structure your layout. You should know that there are a lot of elements that control website ranking, what we’ve discussed here was the web designer part of the equation and nothing more. Always depend on the standard instead of trying to work around the system.

My aim of this article is to highlight the web designer part for designing usable and in the same time search engine optimized pages.

About the author

I’m currently employed as Creative & Media Manager at Linkonline a wholly owned subsidiary of LINKdotNET in Cairo, Egypt. Most know me as web designer, search engine optimizer, user experience consultant or any combination of the three.

Tags: web designers, website design

Webmasters and ezine publishers scramble daily to find fresh content on hot topics for their websites and ezines. They want to give, or sell, this information to their insatiable audiences.

Knowledge grows exponentially, and there is a huge demand for the latest of that knowledge to be summarized into digestible pieces. Ebooks are a great way to distribute that information while creating a list-building virus.

Ebooks are big with website owners and ezine publishers. They have a much higher perceived value that just articles although ebook are often little more than collections of articles.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ebooks, opt in list, Writing