8 Alternative Traffic Ideas
Optimising your website for the search engines is one of the most difficult things to achieve for your online business. The Internet provides many opportunities other than focusing on search engine optimising for gaining traffic to your website, this article discusses many of the other methods available.
1. Post on Forums
Visit forums which are related to your website, for instance if your selling web hosting on your website, visit forums where you can answer questions related to web hosting. On these forums you can post replies to questions allowing you to post your own link to your website. You must be careful not to ensure your posts are not highlighted as SPAM. Forums are a perfect of providing one-way links to your website which will have a positive effect to your search engine ranking placement on the major search engines.
2. Setup your own Online Forum
Not only is posting on other website’s forums useful, but you could also setup your own online forum. This will help to quickly establish content on your website and your website will therefore be constantly updated through the postings of other people. Search engines love up-to-date content and it helps boost your search engine ranking on the popular search engines. Search engines like content which is fresh, unique and always up-to-date. There is no point in Google providing you with a top 10 ranking if your website is out-of-date. Forums can also help to gain related content, you could even post questions to your own forum as if it were a frequently asked questions section on your website. Visitors to your website love to have some sort of interaction, allowing visitors to post information of your website is a good start!
3. Website Article Posting
Create articles for both your website and other article websites on the Internet. Creating articles for your website is a brilliant way to increase your website content and has a positive effect on your search engine ranking placement. The many unique content on your website the better. Remember, the most popular search engine – Google, devotes is search engine algorithm to websites which provide unique, fresh content which is valid and up-to-date. Also creating articles for external websites can be a big bonus, where you can place an external link to your website at the bottom of the article, this also have a positive effect on the search engine optimisation for your website. Articles are not only read by the search engines, but real visitors as well. Articles can provide another source of traffic to your website where readers maybe intrigued by your article and may want to visit your website.
4. Free Website Content
Establish a free content section on your website, where webmasters are allowed to download and use the free content or tools on their website. You can enforce the webmasters to link back to your website in order to use your website tools for free. This can have a positive effect on search engine optimisation as well as help establish another source of traffic for your website. For example, you could provide free webmasters tools such as free guestbooks which webmasters are allowed to place on their website, but in order to place this guestbook on their website they must provide a link to your website. Not only is this free advertising for your website, but also has a positive effect of your search engine ranking placement.
5. Joint-Venture Partnerships
Do your research and find other websites which you could partner with. You should try and aim to pick high-traffic websites as these will be the main source of traffic to your website other than the search engines. Pick related websites, for instance if you are a web hosting company you could try and create a joint-venture partnership with a website which is dedicated to web hosting articles. Linking to related websites is always the best move, as it helps to categorise your website in the search engine’s database index, the more related websites linking to you the better. Try to avoid reciprocal linking as the search engines do not worthy any websites with this sort of external linking structure. Search engines like natural link building and to avoid this pitfall of reciprocal linking try to create a three-way link exchange. A three-way link exchange is where it is a triangle of link exchanges where website A is linking to website B, website B linking to website C and website C linking back to website A. Creating joint-venture partnerships can be the initial founding of website traffic which can attract hundreds of thousands of visitors a day. Do NOT be afraid to contact other webmasters for joint ventures!
6. E-mail Marketing
Obtaining e-mail databases for target audiences will allow you to advertise the products and services which you sell on your website. E-mail advertising can be a great source for attracting new visitors as well as existing customers to your website. E-mail marketing is most effective when launching a new product on your website, as subscribers to the e-mail database can receive information on this product within their inbox. People love to hear the benefits and technical specification of the product which you are selling, therefore when creating your e-mail campaign, include as much detail as possible to convert as many e-mails into sales as possible. Also ensure you obtain your e-mail database from a valid source, your website doesn’t want to be marked as spamming e-mail addresses as this will reflect a negative company image, you could even be banned from the search engines.
7. Niche Keyword Targeting
The biggest pitfalls of webmasters is choosing keywords which are too difficult to optimise for, this is mainly because they are too competitive. Choosing niche keywords to optimise your website for is the best solution as they provide a small amount of traffic within a suitable timeframe. This does require thorough researching and tools are available on the Internet to help you accomplish this, such as WordTracker. WordTracker allows you to choose suitable keywords to optimise your website for, by displaying the number of keyword searches made on the major search engines for your particular industry.
8. Pay-Per-Click Management
Most of the popular search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN provide their own pay-per-click management systems to allow advertisers to create their own text and banners ads to display on publisher websites. The price you pay per click is dependant upon how competitive the keyword is, the more competitive the keyword the higher the price per click. You should try to identify niche keywords to optimise your website for, to try and reduce the cost of your pay-per-click. This will also help you to attain more traffic with less competition. Pay-per-click management is an excellent solution for newly established websites on the Internet as search engine optimisation requires a vast amount of time to gain good natural rankings on the major search engines. The biggest pitfall to this method of advertising is that the pay-per-click can cost a vast amount of money for a small amount of traffic, on the upside most of this traffic is targeted for the products and services you sell on your website.
Conclusion: 8 Alternative Traffic Ideas
Many webmasters are blinded by search engine optimisation, this is not the only source of online traffic for your website. The website traffic ideas mentioned above not only help to establish potential traffic for your website, but most of them also have a positive effect for your search engine optimisation. It also allows you to diversify your risk away from the search engines and help to establish traffic from another potential source. Good luck with your traffic building!
Article Discussion & Comments for 8 Alternative Traffic Ideas
Discussion Pages: 1
Aaron - September 26th, 2008, 4:44 am
Yep these are all pretty solid methods for getting traffic,I hav'nt yet tryed the
PPC route cause i much prefer to not have to pay to get traffic'.
Don't really recommend setting up your own forum unless you can
get people to moderate in the forum,I've found spammers get out of
control quickly in those phpbb type forums.
"Click Below To See How I Get 25-50 Free Visitors To My Website Every Single Day"
goodbyegoogle.totalh.com
Discussion Pages: 1