Reprinted Articles

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.

Some of these tricks will work, but I’d like to discuss several “white hat” methods that result in lasting traffic. They’re not exciting, and they’re not kept under lock and key by any guru, but they’re being used successfully by many webmasters. In fact, it’s a way to future-proof your Web business. These methods will work to produce free traffic for any site you choose for many months and years to come.

Article distribution — As I’m sure you know, article directory sites provide an excellent backlink to your site. Article marketing is one of the primary website promotion techniques that I use to increase website traffic across all my sites. The benefits to writing articles are many. Your keyword rich articles will often rank high in the search results. These high ranking pages linking back to your site boost your site’s listings, often giving you several entries in the top 20 on Google.

In addition to the above, the article directories may also send direct traffic to your site. Since those clicking through to your site have already read your article, they’re highly targeted visitors. There’s a viral effect that occurs when other websites republish your article with a link back to your site. You can continue to get new backlinks without any further effort and this effect can last for months or years.

Making your site delicious — The best social bookmark is one you don’t have to do yourself. You can encourage your visitors to bookmark your pages by placing icons on your site with links to popular social bookmarking sites (such as addthis.com). Bookmarking can dramatically increase the backlinks to your site with minimal effort. In addition, if you bookmark other sites that link to yours, you can improve your rankings in the search engines.

Adding pages — You can never go wrong by building more content. More pages not only means more value for your visitor, it also means more linking opportunities, more PageRank, and more hooks for the search engines to bite into. The long term result, of course, is increasing website traffic. Many sites will come and go, and it’s important to create content so that your site becomes a valuable resource. Content equals staying power.

Social media and community sites — Many people think of Reddit and Digg, but forget about repurposing their content on other social media sites. Instead of trying to play the very difficult game of who’s going to Digg me, you should look at user generated content sites that allow you to post a link to your site. Start with the biggest ones first, as they offer great backlinks and the potential for high traffic. These include Hubpages, Squidoo, and Buzzle, as well as a number of up and coming community sites published on the Ning platform and others like Tumblr.

Increasing website traffic with these methods will produce lasting results, as opposed to some of the risky, flash-in-the-pan methods that so many are suggesting these days. Start incorporating one or more of these techniques, and you’re sure to see an increase in visitor count.

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Tags: Website Traffic