Comprehensive A to Z Guide to Getting Website Traffic

Many of us think that having a good website is all you need to get tons of visitors. This is wrong answer! Getting traffic to your site takes hard work and diligence and is not accomplished overnight. Think about it this way - how are people supposed to know where to find your site if you don't tell them? You must promote it. So if you’re ready, roll up your sleeves and follow these 26 simple steps, and within just one year you will generate enough traffic to keep you busy for a long, long time!

A) Keyword Research

   Before you do anything else, use a keyword research tool and do an extensive job researching the right keyphrases to use for your site. What keyphrases are your direct competitors using? Are there any keyphrases that create a potential for market entry? Are there any that you can put a spin on and create a whole new niche with?

B) Domain Name

   If you want to brand your company name, then choose a domain name that reflects it. If your company is Kawunga, then get www.kawunga.com. If it’s taken, then get www.kawungawidgets.com. No dashes, and no more than two words in the domain if appropriate.

C) Avoid the Sandbox

   Buy your domain name early, as soon as you have chosen your key phrases and your company name. Get it hosted right away and put up a quick one page site saying a little about who you are, what you sell, and that there will be more to come soon. Make sure it gets crawled by Google and Yahoo (either submits it or link to it from another site).

D) Create Unique Content

   Create original content for your site. This will give the spiders something to chew on. It will also give you more opportunities to been seen in the search engine results for a wide variety of key phrases.

E) Site Design

   Use the “Keep It Simple” principle. Employ an external CSS file, clean up any Java Scripts by referring to them off the page in an external file, don’t use frames, use flash the way you would an image, and no matter what, do not create a flash site. Do not offer a busy site with lots of bells and whistles to your visitors. Keep things nice and simple. Make it easy for them to find what they are looking for and they’ll have no reason to look anywhere else.

F) Page Size

   Keep your page size less as much as possible. The less kilobyte your page uses, the better - especially for the home page. Optimize your images and make sure the page loads quickly. Most people and businesses in the Western world may have high speed, but cell phones and other countries might not. If your site loads slowly, you may have already lost your visitor before they’ve even had a chance to browse around.

G) Usability

   Make sure that your site follows good usability rules. Remember that people spend more time on other sites, so don’t violate design conventions. Don’t use PDF files for online reading. Change the colors for visited links, and use good headers. Look up usability for more tips and tricks, it will be worth your while.

H) On Site Optimization

   Use the key phrase you have chosen in your title (most important), your headers (when appropriate), and within the text. Make sure that your page/content is about your key phrase. If you are selling widgets, than write about widgets. Don’t just stick the word widgets into the text.

I) Globals

    Globals are the links that remain the same on every page. They are the reference for new visitors to keep them from getting lost. Sometimes they are on the left of the page, sometimes they consist of tabs at the top. Often they are in the footer of the page as well. Make sure that you have an old style text version of your globals on every page. I usually create tabs at the top, and put the text versions in the footer at the bottom of the page. Find out what works best for you.

J) Headers

   Use bold headers. On the Internet, people scan they don’t read. So initially, all they will see are the headers. If your headers don’t address their concerns, they won’t stick around long enough to read your content. Use appropriate key phrases wherever you can.

K) Site Map

   Build a site map with a link to each of your pages. Keep it up to date. This will allow the spiders to get to every page. Put a text link to the site map on the main pages.

L) Content

   Add a page every 2-3 days: 200-500 words. Create original content, don’t copy others. The more original and useful it is, the more people will read it, link to it, and most importantly of all - like it enough to keep coming back for more and in this way you may create a unique identity on the world wide web.

M) White Hat Only

   Stay away from black hat optimizing techniques. Black hat optimization consists of using any method to get higher rankings that the search engines would disapprove of, such as keyword stuffing, doorway pages, invisible text, cloaking and more. Stick to white hat methods for long-term success. People who use black hat optimization are usually there for the short-term, such as in porn, gambling, and Viagra markets (just look at your email spam for more black hat markets). These black hat industry sites are usually around just long enough to make a quick buck.

N) Competition Analysis

   Who is linking to your competition? Use Yahoo’s “link:” service to see the back links of your competition. For example, type in “link:http://www.yourdomain.com” into Yahoo search without the quotes). Try to get links from the same sites as your direct competitors. Better yet, see if you can replace them!

O) Submit

    Submit to five groups of directories:

    1. Dmoz.org and Yahoo (local, such as Yahoo.co.uk, or Yahoo.ca, etc… if you can).

    2. Find directories in your field and get into them. Pay if you must, but only if the price is reasonable.

   3. Local directories that relate to your country or region.

   4. Any other directories that would be appropriate.

   5. If you are targeting the local market, make sure that you are in the Yellow Pages and Superpages (because search engines use these listings to power local searches)

P) Blog

   Start a blog about your industry and write a new entry at least once a week. Allow your visitors to comment or, better yet, write their own entries. This will create even more content on your site and will keep people coming back regularly to see what is new. Keep your blog up-to-date with unique and regular posting. Wherever possible promote your blog through social media.

Q) Links from Other Sites

   Simply submit your website to appropriate sites, asking that they link to your site as a reference because it will benefit their visitors. Don’t spend too much time on this, if your content is good and original, they will find you and link to you naturally. Remember that Linking is Queen (http://www.mysite.com/promotion/0409.html#feature). Stay away from bad linking partners, links farms, link scams, and any other unnatural links. They may not necessarily hurt you, but Google tracks when you get a link, how long you have had a link, who links to the site that links to you, where you live, what you had for breakfast, and more (not really… but kind of).

R) Statistics

   Make sure your server has a good statistics program. Use it! If you don’t have access to a good program, then pay for one. Without the knowledge of who is coming to your site, from where, and how often, you will be missing out on some essential tools to improve your site.

S) Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

   Sign up for Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Spend money getting people to your site. Use it for branding too. This will create a steady flow of visitors to your site, and will make your site more accessible to your potential clients. You don’t have to be #1, you don’t even have to be #5… just make sure you are on the first page of search results for most of your keyphrases, when the cost is right.

T) Look Ahead

   Stay informed of what is coming up in your market. If a new product will be out next season, write about it now. Take advantage of being a first mover. The search engines, and linkers, will reward you.

U) Write Articles

   Write an article once every week and get it published in as many online publications as you can (with a link back to your site). Include the article on your site. Not only will this create many links to your site, but it will also get people to click to your site, and most importantly you will become an expert in the eyes of your visitors. They may even begin looking for your site by querying your name! 

V) Study Your Traffic Vigilantly

   After 30 to 90 days you will have enough results to analyze in your statistics program. Go over them with a fine tooth comb. Get the answers to these questions:

- Which search engines do they use?

- What queries do they type in?

- Where are your visitors coming from?

- What pages on your site do they visit the most?

- What are the entry pages on your site?

- What are the exit pages?

- What path do they follow when they browse your site?

  Use this information to tweak your site.

- Use the most popular page to encourage the visitors to make you money.

- Adjust the paths they use to send them where you want them.

- Figure out why they leave from the exit pages.

   Also, see what search terms people use to find you, and fine tune your keyphrases. If you targeted “green widgets”, but your visitors are finding you with the query “green leather widgets”, then start creating content about “leather widgets”! 

W) Verify Your Submissions

    After 3-4 months, check that you got into Dmoz.org and all of the other directories that you submitted to. If you have not been included, then submit again, or better yet, write a polite email to the editor and ask why. Also, find any new directories that would be worthy of your submittal time and submit to them. 

X) RSS Feeds

   RSS (Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is becoming a powerful tool for Internet marketers. You can quickly and easily add fresh content to your website. Article feeds are updated frequently, so you can give your visitors (and the search engines) what they want - fresh content! You can use RSS to promote any new content, such as new pages, articles, blogs, press releases, and many more!

Y) Press Releases

    A press release is a written communication that you submit to journalists in the media (newspapers, radio, television, magazines) which are used to make announcements that are newsworthy. Create press releases announcing publication of any new articles or new company information or products. If it is interesting enough, a journalist may pick it up and write an article about it. Before you know it, your website address may get published in the NY Times. 

Z) Keep Your Content Fresh

   Remember to write a new page every 2-3 days. I only mentioned it briefly, but it is probably the most important point in this article. Keep writing! Without fresh content, your site will gradually drop in the search engine results. To stay on top, your content has to be the most up-to-date, freshest, and most interesting and original content in your field.

Follow these 26 simple steps and I assure you that within one year you will call your site a success. You will bring in a massive amount of traffic from within your industry and watch as your business grows! Well this is the least but not the last.

Top 10 Black Hat SEO Techniques

Black Hat SEO techniques are methods webmasters use to get a leg up on the competition in the search engines ranking. Whether they are fair or unfair, legitimate or illegitimate is not up for debate here. This is a list and explanation of top ten black hat SEO techniques.

1. Link Spamming
King of black hat techniques, link spamming is just a way getting links to the websites of your choice through the use of automated software which accesses unprotected blogs through anonymous web proxies and leaves links in their comments. Long, frequently updated lists of proxy IP addresses are necessary, as well as decent comment generation software. Blog software developers have fought back, however, such as the the development of the Askimet comment filter for Wordpress. 

2. Splogs
Close cousins to scraping and spinning, splogs are simply blogs with worthless, automatically generated content. Many splogs read RSS feeds and create blog posts for themselves from them. Splogs are the framework into which scraped and spun content is laid out to create made-for-Adsense (MFA) sites. Also, splogs can be used to get other sites indexed or their Pagerank increased, by including links to them. A large percentage (some say 20% or higher) of the blogs on the web are actually splogs.

3. Scraping and Spinning
Scraping and its cousin spinning are a black hat technique that uses software to spider websites, grab the content, mix it up a bit, paraphrase, randomize, and generate “new” content from it. Often it will contain links to sites the marketer is trying to promote. Or, it will contain Adsense or other ads which are used to monetize the content. Spinning content into duplicate-content-penalty-avoiding text is the holy grail of black hat techniques. Programmers who come up with methods for doing this on-the-fly have created true money machines for themselves. Here’s an excellent scraping and spinning story. 

4.302 Redirect Hijacking
This technique is a really nasty black hat trick where the evil webmaster creates a web page on a high-page-rank domain with a 302 redirect to the page he is trying to hijack. Googlebot (or another search engine spider) follows the redirect to the second page and indexes it, but on the SERP, the URL of the indexed page will be that of the page with the redirect. In other words, the evil black hat webmaster will own the SERP, and the page with the content will be de-indexed. A truly evil hijacker builds cloaking into the redirect so human visitors to the page will go to his “money page”, while search engine spiders will still see the 302 redirect. 

   5. XSS Injection
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is a technique used to take advantage of certain pages with a special security flaw. They accept input from the HTTP GET QUERY_STRING environment variable (the text after the “?” in a URL) and display it on the page. Therefore, it is possible to construct a URL to one of these pages which will be displayed as a link to the site you specify, with the text you specify as the link text. The constructed URL can be set up as a link somewhere that a search engine spider will follow, getting the XSS-generated page indexed.

6. Web Page Cloaking
This technique goes hand-in-hand with the doorway pages technique. The idea behind cloaking is to show a doorway page to search engine spiders but the “money page” to human visitors. Both pages are accessed using the same URL. Software is used to identify the search engine spiders and serve the doorway page to them. There is a dual purpose to web page cloaking: competitors are kept from scraping the content of the optimized doorways, and human visitors are kept from seeing the ugly doorway pages (the redirect is unnecessary in a properly executed cloaking solution). I may be a little biased about web page cloaking because I am the author of KloakIt, a cloaking software application. 

7. Doorway pages
Doorway pages are web pages created solely for the purpose of being spidered by search engines and included in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They are usually optimized for placement in the SERPs by being stuffed with keywords and created in bulk. Often, you will see that the pages are named after the primary keyword being targeted. Also, doorway pages will likely have a form of redirection involved sending visitors to the “money site”. The redirection can be a meta refresh tag or javascript. Most webmasters using this technique will have software which cranks out doorway pages by the thousands.

8. Keyword Stuffing/Hidden Text
This technique involves picking a bunch of keywords for which a marketer wants a page to be optimized, and then placing them on the page in such a way that they will be read by search engine spiders, but not by human visitors. They can be located in a hidden div tag, colored so that they blend into the background, or even placed within HTML comment tags. This is truly an oldschool technique, and is not nearly as effective now as it was back in the day.

9. Cyber Hoaxing
Hoaxing is a way of “creatively” making news. First, create a fake news website that looks real. Second, write a sensational but false news story. It helps if it is difficult to prove the veracity. Third, create multiple accounts on various social networking sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, etc., and submit your story there. Fourth, be ready for emails and phone calls from actual big-time media outlets with questions about your story. You will generate buzz and get links to your fake news story. Eventually, when it is discovered your story is false, try to capitalize on the outrage. How to monetize the whole situation is up to the webmaster, but it is commonly done with affiliate programs. 

10. Buying Links
Whenever we heard about Buying Link so many questions raised in our mind and I think most vital one is...” Is buying links a black hat technique? Of course it is. When a marketer pays for a link, they are essentially “buying a vote” for the page they are promoting. That link would not exist except that it was paid for. This gives extra weight to the promoted page in the search engine algorithms. The paid-for link does not itself add extra value to visitors, so the technique must be black hat.

Basic Things of the Search Engine Optimization Process

Search engine optimization is important because it improves the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines. Do you want to put your website in the high ranking? Here are some tips you have to consider:

1. How Google Measures Link Popularity

Higher link popularity scores = Higher search engine ranking

Link popularity is by far the most important factor for determining your search engine ranking. You need to know what link popularity is, why it is so important, and how Google measures your link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffic comes from Google, and if you can get to the top of Google, you will raise to the top of the others search engines as well).

Link popularity - the number of links (votes) that SE have for your site.

Here is a link for a good tool that measures the link popularity from SE’s. It shows you the link popularity from Google Yahoo and MSN and lets you to see the history report so you to figure out the rise of your site.

2. Articles:

Consistency is the key. It is a fact that as more and more articles are added to article directories, your article will go lower in the listings, but if you constantly and consistently submit new articles, then you will continue to reap the benefits. Making articles is a great way to build up the link popularity of your website. It gives you life-time links.

• Always close your articles off with a link to your site which is relevant to the copy of the article. Hyperlink the keyword with your the URL.

3. Control Your Words.

“Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts”.

This does not apply to our situation. In the Meta Tags, you must count every word and every keyword. Use a tool like this one to count the characters from your Meta tags.”

4. Optimize the Title Tag

• Include 1-2 of your most important keyword phrases in the title tag, but don’t just list keywords.
If you just list keywords, you risk being viewed as spamming the search engines which can ultimately lead to you being blacklisted and not included at all.

• Your title tag should include your keyword phrases within a readable sentence to avoid this problem.

• Make your title appealing to humans!

Don’t forget that even if you get that top listing in the search engines, our listing still needs to say something that makes the surfer want to click your link and visit your site.

• Since the length of your title tag could cause some engines to crop it, we suggest place the keywords at the beginning of the tag when possible to decrease the risk of having them cut off.

Each page of your site should have its own title tag with its own keywords that relate to the page that it appears on.

5. Optimize the Meta Description Tag

• Give appropriate descriptions (as some search engines display this description in the search result), make it more appropriate to your site. Put only targeted keywords in description. Do not stuff the description with more keywords. Restrict the number of words in this tag to 10 to 15 words or may be 150 to 160 character is sufficient.

• Place the most important phrases at the start of the description, so, even if any search engine omits some part of the description, the important phrases will be displayed.

6. Optimize the Meta Keywords Tag

The importance of Meta Tags is debated these days. So this is an optional extra.

• Include only the keywords that appear in the body text, and no more than 5-7 keywords. Add alternate spelling of words (including typos) and synonyms of those keywords. 

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often considered the more technical part of Web marketing. This is true because SEO does help in the promotion of sites and at the same time it requires some technical knowledge – at least familiarity with basic HTML. SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines deal with text. Usually, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

One of the basic truths in SEO is that even if you do all the things that are necessary to do, this does not automatically guarantee you top ratings but if you neglect basic rules, this certainly will not go unnoticed. Also, if you set realistic goals – i.e to get into the top 30 results in Google for a particular keyword, rather than be the number one for 10 keywords in 5 search engines, you will feel happier and more satisfied with your results.

Although SEO helps to increase the traffic to one's site, SEO is not advertising. Of course, you can be included in paid search results for given keywords but basically the idea behind the SEO techniques is to get top placement because your site is relevant to a particular search term, not because you pay. 

SEO can be a 30-minute job or a permanent activity. Sometimes it is enough to do some generic SEO in order to get high in search engines – for instance, if you are a leader for rare keywords, then you do not have a lot to do in order to get decent placement. But in most cases, if you really want to be at the top, you need to pay special attention to SEO and devote significant amounts of time and effort to it. Even if you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work and which items are most important in SEO.