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[I237]Increase Traffic To Your Web

by Jeff Colman, Jef

The right blog makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases, WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices.

Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain

Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot.

Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind

First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags which are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
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Participate at Related Forums & Blogs

Irrespective of the industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, and then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).

Tag Your Content

Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it).

Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)

There's something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there's an easy solution - don't offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you're upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.

Don't Jump on the Bandwagon

Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and is counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view.

Link Intelligently

When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquettes and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.

Web 2.0 or 'Social Media' should never be a free-for-all for 'bizopp' pitching, although I'd have to say that happens continually. Web 2.0 is about 'community' and offering value unconditionally and therefore attracting like-minded people to you and to your business.

'But I can increase traffic to my site with Web 2.0 by sending my site link to thousands of people can't I? Er..... no. That's the worst thing you can do, because you're spamming people. How excited are you when ads for Viagra land in your inbox? 'Up front pitching' your business opportunity to your Facebook and MySpace friends creates the same negative response and is everything that Web 2.0 shouldn't be.

However if you're asking 'can I increase traffic to my site with Web 2.0 by sending entertaining or uplifting content to people?' then the answer is the total opposite. If you share quality content with like-minded people then you are using the skills of 'attraction marketing' which is everything that's good about Web 2.0.

One method that can leverage your 'friend-adding' is to use 'adding software' though do be a bit careful. First of all, if you use this for spamming 'bizopps' all you're doing is annoying lots of people at once instead of one at a time. Web 2.0 sites are also wary of any patterns of large scale friend-adding.

But if you're offering uplifting content and you've a profile that is interesting, entertaining and not stuffed full of graphics and 'extreme' audio tracks, then people's interest can be piqued. Definitely avoid going for tiny fonts and colours that offer virtually no contrast to the background. It may sound a small thing but you wouldn't believe how many MySpace profiles I see that are virtually impossible to read!

If you're asking 'can I increase traffic to my website by writing articles on Web 2.0 sites', that's a big 'thumbs-up' too. Sites like Squidoo, Hubpages and Scribd to name but three are sites that Google looks very favourably on. Look how many articles from these sites turn up on the first page of the search results. You may not have noticed that before, but you will now if you look!

Web 2.0 is not an overnight 'cure-all' for getting traffic to your website. If you want immediate results then you can always buy pay-per-click advertising, provided you know what you're doing. Like with a lot of things you can save time by spending money or save money by spending time. Web 20 marketing falls more into the second category.

So if you're still enquiring how can I increase traffic to my website and you've not yet harnessed the power of Web 2.0, then I would encourage you to do so. Provided you are giving value to the community and not going straight for their wallets, then all kinds of benefits can land in your lap.

Article Source : lg marketing mix

About Author

Both Jeff Colman & Alun Maxwell are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Jeff Colman has sinced written about articles on various topics from Marketing, Search Engine Marketing and SEO Search Engine Optimization. Get even more with help of Jeff Colman's new . Jeff Colman's top article generates over 6600 views. to your Favourites.

Alun Maxwell has sinced written about articles on various topics from Marketing, Internet Marketing and Residual Income. Alun Maxwell is an experienced networker and online marketer, and helps many networkers harness the power of the internet to build their businesses. A specialist in one-to-one communication, he is hired by many top European companies as a Business Rolepla. Alun Maxwell's top article generates over 1900 views. to your Favourites.