NEW ARTICLES  HOT ARTICLES  TOP RATED  ADD AN ARTICLE  UPDATE AN ARTICLE  GET RATED 
  HOME     MY ACCOUNT     POWER SEARCH     REGISTER     SUPPORT     SUGGEST CATEGORY  

If You Build It, They Will Come...
23990 Internet > Web Development Jun 15, 2007 If You Build It, They Will Come... ...No they won't. On the web, building a web site is not enough. If there are no links to the site anywhere, no-one is going to visit it. The site won't even be listed in any of the search engines without some incoming links. To get traffic, you will need to do some promotion. Web Directories The basic part of any promotion campaign, web directories, whist they may not generate much in the way of traffic, will help in your site's search engine ranking. A good list of free, non-reciprocal, search engine friendly directories can be found at Vilesilencer's SEO Friendly List. Pay Per Click Advertising This is advertising such as PPC Search Engines, like Yahoo!'s Overture, and contextual advertising, like Google's AdWords. Be warned, it is very easy to go through a substantial amount of money for no reward using these services if you are not careful. AdWords (amongst others) lets you pick a maximum budget a day, but, although $5 may not sound like much, $5/day is $150+ per month. Better make sure your keywords are correctly identified, and, in preference, not highly competed on, and that your sales copy is good enough before doing this. Quality Traffic, not Just Traffic It's what everyone is after, more traffic to their website. Traffic is easy to obtain, though. Autosurfers, manual hit exchanges and purchased traffic will all send visitors to your website. However, this traffic is just visitors, many of whom will just burn up your bandwidth for no reward. Unless you are receiving decent money for pay per impression advertising, such as banners and popups, this traffic can be totally valueless. Repeat Traffic Unless you only require visitors to visit your site once, because you are selling a one-off product, and your sales copy is fantastic enough that they are hooked to buy on the first visit (and if you are regulary doing this, write an ebook explaining how and sell it), you will want visitors to return. If there is nothing of value at your site, visitors may come once, but they won't come back of their own accord. Typically, it is estimated that a prospective customer will be exposed seven times to a product etc. before buying. Reciprocal Linking Whilst somewhat frowned upon, and generally thought to not be as valuable as one-way linking (see below) for search engine optimization, a relevant reciprocal linking campaign can be an important traffic generating tool. swap links with sites in a related, but non-competing, business to your own. It isn't really a good idea to link to competitors; although visitors will be interested in your product, there is a good chance you will lose them to your competitor, especially if their website or product is better or looks better than your own. Not a desirable outcome. For example, a web hosting site could link to a site that sells scripts and programs; visitors to one will more than likely use the other, but the sites are not in direct competition. You can also swap links with web directories that require a reciprocal link. One-Way Linking Considered the best form of link for SEO purposes, this can also be a good source of traffic. There are a number of ways of getting one-way links. The easiest is submission to free web directories (see above). Another good source is by writing articles relevant to your site or industry, putting a resource box at the bottom, then posting the article on the directories such as GoArticles, or by sumbitting to the ezines. Webmasters and ezine publishers are always in need of fresh content, and will publish your article for free. The hardest way of getting one-way inbound links is by having websites voluntarily link to you. The only way to do this is by providing a valuable tool, service or resource that other webmasters will want to direct their visitors to. (c)2005 eGDC Ltd
Adrian Kennelly is the webmaster of DirectoryGold Web Directory, which includes ScriptsGold Script Directory

Write a Review   Add to My Favorite   Refer it to Friend   Report Article  

Average Visitor Rating: 0.00 (out of 5)
Number of ratings: 0 Votes

Visitor Rating


Other links at Internet > Web Development
There are two kinds of links you should include in your site. You should include a general links section for the benefit of your customers, and you should include a reciprocal links section to help you and other businesses as well as your customers.
Category:

If you only sell product, then that is what you get money for products. Traffic is a must if any online business is to succeed.
Category:

The short answer is maybe. The long answer is that the question might be better asked, ?Is a 100% FLASH web site appropriate in business?.? The answer to this question, in my humble opinion is, absolutely not. In fact, we have had several clients come to
Category:

Surveys have shown that when potential customers want to find a website for information, or to purchase a product or service, they do this in one of three ways. The most popular option, by far, is that they find a website by using a search engine.
Category:

RSS aggregators are programs that use RSS to source these updates, and then organize those lists of headlines, content and notices for easy reading. It allows computers to automatically retrieve and read the content that users want, then track changes and
Category:




Site Sponsor
Directory Statistics

Articles: 68309
Categories: 501

Yahoo Entertainment
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional   Valid CSS