Web Site Traffic Tutorial

This is it. This is the big enchilada! This is the secret that will make or break your attempt to earn revenue on the Internet. While there are millions of people surfing the Internet, they need to find their way to your web site in order to find out about the products or services that you make available to them. After you've read the advertising page, read on for traffic tips.

Organic Search Results
The cheapest way to get good web traffic is to show up in the search engines. With millions of competing webmasters out there, this is not always easy to do. At the very least, you need to learn a little bit about keywords and their optimization. In particular, the titles, headings and writing contained on your web page will have a lot to do with it's ranking. Participating in link list style pages or public classifieds sites often will not.

The search engines that provide traffic to my web site the most are Google, Yahoo and MSN. They seem to be the big players these days, but there may be other engines that work for you. Make sure you submit your web sites to these places. Also, some directories, such as the Open Directory Project, are used by these companies to help find and rank web sites -- so be sure to submit your sites there as well.

For more information read our tutorial on SEO techniques...

Pick Your Battles
When you are creating web site content, you need to be aware of the competition you are facing. For example, go type "music" in as a Google search term. Thee is no way you will be able to compete against 1 billion other pages that reference music in some way. Now, go type "modern hip hop music". As I write this there are only about 13 million competing pages. More importantly, if I look at the pages that rank well in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), I can tell that they aren't that well crafted for the search phrase.

There is a chance that I could develop a site on this particular topic, work to develop back links from appropriate sites to develop authority, provide a good amount of relevant content as well as perhaps some type of dynamic content or news, and end up with a top ten ranking. This is what is meant by choosing a niche. This is how you can get free web site traffic! Don't go up against the entire world of established business. Find something you know about, that you are passionate about, that doesn't appear to have a lot of professionally targeted content.

The only thing remaining is to make sure that whatever you do optimize for actually receives traffic. If nobody performs searches for the niche keywords that you have targeted, then there will be no point in targeting them. Combining your nice with quality content and optimized keyword targeting for terms that develop web traffic is the entire secret. It is the secret within the secret if you will. At the current time free traffic is the holy grail of web income, good luck.

Inbound Links
Another great way to generate traffic for your web site is to get other people to link to you. It is still possible to do, but it is a lot harder than it used to be. The basic method of finding a related but not competitive site and then writing to the webmaster may still be your best bet. The problem is that you simply must have a good site with plenty of content before anyone will be convinced to link to it. One way around this is to build a bunch of web sites, each capable of generating traffic, then linking to your own sites.

Although perhaps frowned upon by Google, there are people that are willing to sell you links. These links may be purchased for various purposes, such as keyword relevance, traffic or perhaps site rank improvements. If you spend some time reading on various webmaster forums you will be able to find link trading offers. One company set up to deal with this issue is Text Link Ads. Generally these are sold as an HTML text link for $X/month. However, as a free alternative, you may also be able to link to yourself from various small directories if you can find them and add your link.

Where to Buy
There are many people trying to you sell you traffic. I'd suggest that other than guerilla advertising you limit yourself to search engine keyword placement. For example, use companies such as searchfeed.com, goclick.com and Google Adwords. Smaller providers may deliver lower quality traffic, but they will sell web site visitors at a lower cost per click than brand name companies such as Google or Yahoo.

Other Web Traffic Sources
If you want to try purchasing web site traffic via other means, then you need to be very careful. At the very least, purchase only a small quantity of traffic to start. In many cases this traffic will be delivered to people via pop-up, pop-under or domain redirect methods. These visitors did not consciously choose to visit your web site and generally are not very likely to afford you much by way of revenue opportunities. I can't recommend using these sources of traffic at all.

Traffic Trades
It is possible to trade traffic with various web sites or search systems. Basically, these work by tracking how much traffic you send to them and then returning traffic to your site based on this. Many of the rank lists in the adult industry work in this way -- and one way to get a good ranking is to purchase a ton of low quality traffic and send it to your traffic trading partners in an appropriate manner.

Again, let me reiterate this point. The only type of purchased traffic I will truly recommend is search engine paid placements. When you use this feature you are almost guaranteed that the visitor is interested in the type of product or service that you are promoting with your web site. You'll be able to define a ratio of visitors to purchases and decide how much you are willing to pay per visitor to your web site.

Using lower end search engine placement services may lower the quality of the web traffic you receive, but it will allow you much greater cost flexibility with respect to traffic acquisition. Finally, a bonus tip for reading all the way through, purchasing commonly mispelled words or larger search phrase word combinations can allow you do reduce the number of competing bidders -- which can lower your cost. However, with Adwords, the key to allowing low bids is to make sure your pages are very relavent to the keywords you purchase.