Part 1 of How to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Part 3 of How to Drive Traffic to Your Website 3
Part 2: How to Drive Traffic to Your Website 2
All About Content
Now let’s talk a bit about site content. It’s crucial that your site contains quality content that’s not duplicated elsewhere. Search engines are becoming wise to duplicate content, and sites that contain it do not receive good rankings. There are several reasons why duplicate content can occur, and one of them has to do with PLR articles, or Private Label Rights articles. PLR articles are articles that are normally sold in packages, sometimes through a subscription service. The problem with these articles is that so many different webmasters have access to them. If you find yourself using PLR articles to create your site’s content, it’s crucial that you rewrite the articles to make them unique.
You might have seen those sites that offer free articles for use on your site. This may sound appealing, but it usually does more harm than good, because of the duplicate content issue. Most of the time, you are not allowed to change the content of these articles, making it impossible to avoid having duplicate content. These free article sites do have some benefits, however, which we’ll discuss later.
On the topic of content, it cannot be stressed enough that quality content is key to good traffic. Search engines look for sites whose content is unique, of high quality, and added on a regular basis. If you’re unable to add pages of content to your site each day, consider hiring a professional writer to do it for you. Good content is truly one of the most important aspects of optimizing your site for search engines and getting the traffic you desire. Plus, visitors are more likely to bookmark your site and return to it regularly if they know that the content is updated often.
You’ll want to check your site thoroughly before submitting it to search engines to ensure that you have no broken links, one of the most detrimental factors to a site’s ranking and popularity. You’ll see on some sites that webmasters have a link where visitors can report broken links if they come across them.
Another important aspect of SEO is having a sitemap. Your sitemap page should be linked from every page of your site. In this sitemap, it should be easy to access the pages of your site. Sites that contain detailed sitemaps are normally seen as more favorable by search engines than those that do not.
Now that you’ve learned a bit about search engine optimization, let’s look at some of the other aspects of bringing traffic to your site.
Obtaining Backlinks
Backlinks, defined as links that point to your site on other sites, are one of the most important aspects to consider when optimizing your site for traffic. The more backlinks your site has, the higher it will rank with search engines. And, the more backlinks you have out there, the more people are bound to see your site. Thankfully, there are lots of great ways to obtain backlinks.
One way is to utilize forums and message boards, especially those that relate to your site in some way. You’ll find that on these forums and message boards, you can use a signature. Make sure to read the policies of the site, and if they allow advertisements in the sig line, then by all means take advantage of this. By including your link in your sig line, then making a good number of regular, quality posts (no spam!) you will get more backlinks pointing to your site.
Another way to get backlinks is through link trading. Link trading is where you exchange links with another webmaster. This is especially effective if the sites you are trading with have a high Page Rank. One way to find websites to trade with is to visit webmaster forums. Many of these types of forums have a special section devoted to link trading. You can also search for sites that you feel are of good quality, then email the webmaster and request a link trade. Some webmasters will be happy to trade with you, some won’t. In some cases, you can even purchase links on quality sites.
Then there’s the directory route, another great way to get links. There are hundreds of different web directories out there where you can submit your site. Some of them cost money to list your site, while some of them are free. DMOZ is probably the best example of a free quality directory. Getting your site listed on directories can take time, especially if the directory is large, so be prepared to wait a few weeks.
Listing on directories serves several purposes. First, it allows people searching the directory a way to find your site. Second, it builds the quantity of quality backlinks you have. One helpful site is http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/free-web-directories.html where you will find a big list of free and pay directories where you can submit your site.
Now, let’s talk more about those free article directories — one of the best ways to get backlinks to your website. There are probably hundreds of these sites out there, and you can submit to them all. The key is to write articles that relate to the topic of your site in some way. Then at the bottom of each article, you’re given a space to include a short bio and the link to your site.
When webmasters come to these free article directories seeking free content, it’s possible they’ll use your article. So not only are you getting the backlink from the free article site, you’re getting backlinks from all the sites that are using your free articles. These backlinks will improve your Page Rank, and people who read the articles may click your link and end up at your site.
Related posts:
{ 2 trackbacks }