When you want to attract visitors to your site, they have to come from somewhere. You can work on a high position in the search engines (covered in the fourth lesson), but it's hard to reach a top 10 spot, especially when the competition is fierce. It's much faster to get more incoming links from other sites, preferably sites that have many visitors. It's also a more steady source of traffic. If a search engine lowers your ranking for whatever reason, you're left with almost no visitors just like that.
Get your link out everywhere!
Try a few of the following tips, and, if you're really serious about your traffic, try all of them. It might take a little work, but if you work on it consistently, your traffic will grow and grow and grow... A pleasant side effect of getting more exposure is that other people will start linking to your site, too.
Tip 1. Leave Comments on Blogs
Most blogs give visitors the opportunity to respond to their posts, with an option to enter your website's address in a field. Find the most popular blogs on topics that are relevant to your website and leave relevant remarks. The earlier you reply, the higher your comment will be in the comment list and the more exposure your website will get. Don't put your url in the comment text, unless it's really relevant to the post you're responding to. Too many url's in one comment will probably be deleted automatically by any spam software the blogger has installed.
Tip 2. Post in Forums
Find the most popular forums in your website's topic by typing "my topic forum" in Google. Start posting good quality answers to questions people have. Put your url with a small tagline in your signature. Don't put your url in the post itself: people will think you're just there to promote your site. Genuine answers will get you high quality traffic. These visitors are people that are really interested in your topic, so treat them well.
Tip 3. Review Products and Services
Sites that sell products or services, such as Amazon, allow you to create a profile and submit reviews. Try to submit high quality reviews, because you will be viewed as more of an expert in the related field. It might also help place your reviews in a more visible place. For example at Amazon, the highest rated reviews are shown first and only after that they are ordered chronologically.
Tip 4. Submit Your Site to Social Bookmarking Sites
There are some very popular websites out there, that can give you tons of traffic. Submitting your url to
digg.com and
del.icio.us can give you a serious amount of traffic. The huge number of visitors from Digg can even cause your site to become slow or unreachable if your host can't handle that much traffic. This has a nickname know as 'The Digg effect'.
Stumble upon can give you a steady stream of visitors that will never stop, as long as people will like your site. If you don't have a
Flickr and
MySpace account, create one and get some exposure there.
Tip 5. Manually Submit Your Site to the Major Search Engines
You didn't think I'd leave out this tip, did you? Be sure to submit manually, most search engines don't like automated submission software. It takes a little while for your site to get indexed, so be patient.
Tip 6. Submit Your Site to Directories
Submit to as many web directories as possible. A few examples are:
Google directory and
Yahoo! directory. Submit your site to the right categories only. It will take some time for your site to appear on the list, most directories preview submissions manually. If you have a blog, be sure to submit to the dozens of blog directories.
Tip 7. Answer Questions at Yahoo!
Another way of showing your expertise and leaving a link to your site at the same time. Answer people's questions on
Yahoo! answers. For the most relevant visitors, pick the most relevant categories.
Tip 8. Do Link Exchanges
Find relevant sites and mail them or using their contact form if they have one. Many site owners will like a link from your site and will gladly link back to you. They seem to get more reluctant as their sites are more popular, but it doesn't hurt to ask.
Tip 9. Start a Lens on Squidoo
Start a lens on
Squidoo. Never heard of it? Find out what it is over
here.
By now you probably know what I mean with the title of this lesson. You can never have enough incoming links. Whenever you come to a site where people can leave a message, don't hesitate to do it and leave your link. Don't ever spam, but be relevant to the topics of the site. Build a positive image and people will keep coming to your site.
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