Get Visitors to your Website

Once you have built your site, of course, you will need to know how to get visitors to see what you offer, whether it is products you are selling or just good information. The first thing that I recommend for you to do is go to google and type in google toolbar, now install it. It is free and this is one of the most useful tools you will ever use when running a website. Once you have installed this and you see it at the top of your browser window, click on the button named 'Options'. You will see three tabs - Browsing, Search and More. Stay on the Browsing tab and put a check in the 'PageRank display' box (I will tell you all about PageRank later on). Now click on the More tab. Put a check in the 'Page Info' box. You are done for now. With this tool you can now check the pagerank of your website, your competitors and your link exchange partners. Like I said, I will go in depth about the importance of PageRank later on but this is not extremely important right now. Before I get into the marketing part of this training, I would like to put out a word of Caution. During your time as a Webmaster you will see over and over websites promising to drive thousands and thousands of targeted hits to your website, these are SCAMS. Most have software that can alter your page counter or website stats, that you can usually view on the webstats at your host, so that it looks like you have really gotten these visitors. Others just simply do nothing and steal your money. How do they get away with it? I have no clue, but they do every day. I have not seen every single website on the web so I cant say that there is not something out there that can promise something like this and actually go through with it but I would just advise to be very cautious and research anything like this before trying it. Now I will tell you exactly what you need to do to get quality, REAL traffic to your website. First you should realize that you will not Get Rich Quick but it is VERY possible to get rich in time. Below are the two most important steps you need to follow in order to drive traffic to your site. Content - Come up with as much content for your website as possible. If you haven't heard the saying 'Content is King' you will several times in the future. In my opinion, and many others, Content truly is king. The more pages you have and the more words you have on the pages the BETTER. This doesn't mean you have to create a thousand pages to get visitors. You could get a few hundred visitors a day with just 30 pages or less if you have alot of links, which I will talk about next, but you should always create some content whenever you have time. Links - I am sure you have noticed on almost every website on the internet there is a link page or resources page. Links are extremely important to the success of your website. The reason for this is that Google, Yahoo and every other search engine consider a website as being worth while if their crawlers see that your link is on many other pages on the internet. Before I get too deep into this subject always remember that RELEVANCE IS KEY. If you have a website about Nike Shoes you should be finding linking partners that have websites about shoes, or sports or sporting goods or apparel, you get the point. The links that you have on your website aren't what they love to see, it is the links on other pages. Then why is it good to have a links page? It is not necessarily GOOD to have a links page but it is something you need to have. If you ask a fellow Webmaster if they would like place your link on their website they will probably laugh at you and delete your e-mail. If you ask a fellow webmaster if he would like to exchange links they will usually agree, as long as your website is not full of spam or has something they do not like on it. There are several reasons why a Webmaster may deny your link exchange request (we will get into this later) but you must realize for every one that denies it there are probably 5, 10 or even 100 that will. The process of exchanging links, AKA reciprocal linking, is pretty simple. I will tell you a very successful technique I use to start promoting a website. Go to Google to start with since it is the number one search engine, and Yahoo next then MSN then all other popular search engines and type in the Keyword or Keyword Phrase that you have selected for your site. These are your competitors. Do not get too intimidated, you do not necessarily have to beat nike.com if your website is about shoes or Microsoft if it is about computers. You do not even have to be on the first page of search results to be successful. Start off by going to the number one search result. Look all over the front page of that website and look for a link named links, or resources or add url. Some sites will have this very well laid out and simple to exchange links while others may not even have an option. If you see a website that has a links page but no option to exchange, send them an e-mail, tell them you like their site and you would like to request a link exhange. An example of a simple link request is like this: Hello, I came across your Quality site through a Google Search and I feel you provide valuable information to your viewers. I own and operate a site specializing in (travel, nike shoes, whatever your site is about) and I would like to request a reciprocal link exchange. I feel my site is very relevant and would be a good fit on your links page. If you accept I will be happy to place your link on my links page, just send me the details. If you are interested; my linking details are below: Title: Your Keyword or Phrase Description: This is where you type in a sentence or two describing your site and what exactly you offer. I would suggest making the length of this about this long. But you could make it this long too. Some site and directories only accept short descriptions though. URL: http://www.yoursite.com Thank You for your time and consideration, Best Regards, John Doe This is just an example of the format and wording for a link request. Once you have written the link request you like, it may be a good idea to copy and paste it into a word document so you do not have to type it all over and over. Just copy and paste it into the e-mail changing it to suite the request, if needed. You can go down the list as far as you want. Once you get to the point to where the search results for your keyword do not seem relevant anymore try another relevant keyword or go onto the next search engine as each search engine comes up with different results. You may come across offers saying you can pay a website and they will place your link on their website. This is a contravercial technique. Some say its not good to do it others say it doesnt matter. I have personally bought links on other websites but I do deep research before doing so. I would never pay more than 25-30 dollars a month for a site-wide link to a quality website. You Definitely DO NOT have to buy links with anyone. If you have the extra money to do so it could help but do not worry about it if you would rather not spend money. Now I will tell you about the NUMBER ONE way to promote your website and get ONE-WAY links to your website. A One-Way Link is when someone places your link on their website without a link to their website on yours. The number one way to promote your website and get one-way links to your website it by post articles to Article Directories. When you post your articles to Article Directories, there is an area at the bottom of your article called the 'signature block' or 'about the author', here you will write something about you and your website. Here is a good example of a signature block: Joshua Spaulding is an Author providing average people the opportunity to Start their own Home Business Online. Joshua provides this opportunity through his web-site at http://www.jobathomesolutions.com The link in the signature block is what will drive traffic to your site. You will get a few visitors here and there just from those who find your article and click on your link but that is not what you are counting on. I will explain something else first, then I will get back to that. When you post an article to a directory, you agree to let other webmasters post your article on their website as long as they keep the signature block intact with the Article. THIS is what provides the one-way links to your site, not to mention the one way link in the first place from the actual directory and THIS is what will eventually drive traffic to your site. Create an Article: You can either write the articles yourself or hire a GhostWriter to do it for you. When writing the Article be sure to format it correctly. This is not very hard to figure out. To learn a little more about articles including How to Write an Article visit my article creation page. The reason for a good article format is that most Article Directories will not accept your article unless it looks professional. The average length of your Articles should be approximatly 350 words, no less. You can make your articles longer than 350 words but I would not go over 500 words. Find Quality Article Directories: Do a search for 'Article Directory' on Google and you should be able to find plenty. Some quality directories that I use are ArticlesAlley.com, EzineArticles.com, EveryArticles.com and Articledashboard.com. Find as many of these directories as you can and post each article to all of them if possible. If you have the time, you should submit at least two articles per week to as many directories as possible. Of course there will be times when you do not have time to write all of these articles, just allways keep this in mind. You do not HAVE to submit that many articles but the more the better. One more very important factor in writing your article is to refrain from advertising. Your advertising space is your Signature Block, NOT the article. If your article is about Nike Shoes you should be talking about how they are manufactured or the different types or anything to do with nike shoes, or shoes in general. DO NOT talk about how you provide information about Nike Shoes at your website. The articles should be totally informational. While all links to your site are good, there is one type that is the best. Links with an 'anchor text' like most of the links on this page. A basic link is one like this: http://www.yoursite.com A link with 'anchor text' is one like this: Make Money Online If you use a website editor like Dreamweaver, creating these links inside your website is simple, you just type in the text, highlight it and then type in the URL of the site you want the text linked to in the box at the bottom that says Link. If you edit code manually you can paste a code like the one below into your html. When you create your signature block it is very wise to use a link with anchor text. Most major Article Directories accept this, including those mentioned above and it is very easy to do. When you are entering your article you just place the code below into the signature block exactly where you want the link to be. For instance if you want the link text to be Make Money Online and your website is http://www.jobathomesolutions.com you would use the following code: <a href="http://www.jobathomesolutions.com" target="_parent">Make Money Online </a> To change the site and link text all you have to do is change the http://makemoneyonline.josh4info.com part of the code to your website, and change Make Money Online to your keyword, or the text you want to use. When entering the code your signature block should look exactly like this: Joshua Spaulding is an Author providing average people the opportunity to Start their own Home Business Online. Joshua provides this opportunity and others, helping people to start <a href="http://www.jobathomesolutions.com" target="_parent">Making Money Online </a>. It looks bad now but once the article is submitted it will look exactly like this: Joshua Spaulding is an Author providing average people the opportunity to Start their own Home Business Online. Joshua provides this opportunity and others, helping people to start Making Money Online. Well Thats it. So your eyes hurt from reading all of this, oh well, you now know more than what 90 percent of all webmasters know. If you didnt take all of this information in be sure to go over it until you do. The sooner you understand everything on this page the better off you are. If you do everything I just told you, your website will be booming in no time. P.S. To check the number of links pointing to your site a any time just type in link:http://www.yourdomain.com into any search engine, the number of results it shows is how many backlinks you have to your site.