5 Ways to Quickly Improve your Traffic
May 7, 2007 | Comments (2) | Filed under: Traffic
Starting off a new site can sometimes feel like a daily fight to bring in traffic. For most sites, there is an initial surge (I mean, you started at zero, how can it not go up?) but once your organic visits settle, you seem to reach a virtual plateau.
No one wants to exist on that plateau.
Inevitably, you reach a point where you simply want more. More money, more subscribers, more e-Friends, more community members, more opportunities, the list goes on and on. Some people reach that point very quickly while others take their time. It doesn’t matter how big you are, at some point you’ll want more…
There is one sure fire way to ensure you have the chance at anything and everything, and that is to CONSTANTLY work on increasing your traffic. This is not a one day procedure either, its a daily task that you have to constantly work on to be successful at.
To help in that regard, here are 5 proven techniques to help increase traffic to your site:
Make Yourself Visible to Search Engines
One of the biggest and costly mistakes a new site can make is to assume search engines will just find them. The Internet consists of billions of web pages on millions of topics and your new site doesn’t stand a chance out there alone with no support. Even if the engines do find you eventually, can you be sure they will figure out how to index all of your content?
In this day and age, you can’t leave anything to chance. Making yourself visible to search engines is a job that seems simple but ends up being somewhat complex and difficult to master. There are several things you can do to make yourself more visible.
- Make sure your site is search engine optimized
- Publish your SiteMap
- Tell search engines you exist
- Write good and relevant titles for your posts
- Promote long tail keywords that help you rank highly
Participate in Communities
One of my favorite ways to improve my traffic is to actively participate in the community of readers that visit this site. There are many ways to participate, including adding comments to their posts, frequenting their forums, or simply joining their community via a service such as MyBlogLog. You’d be surprised how quickly you make new friends and regular visitors just by being friendly and stepping outside of your blogging bubble.
There are many visitors here at Bookmark Bliss that didn’t even know this site existed until I stopped by and said hello. Here are several ways you can participate in communities and quickly improve your traffic:
- Visit your MyBlogLog community and join related sites
- Frequent forums and establish yourself as an authority (with links in your signature)
- Post intelligent comments on related sites
- Use cheap promotion ideas to engage your community and entice new readers
- Participate in a meme
Publish, Promote, and Encourage Your RSS Feeds
Not everyone has the time to manually visit every interesting site on a daily basis. These potential readers, however, may be inclined to instead subscribe to your news feed and stay on top of your traffic through an RSS reader. To grab the attention of these readers and encourage repeat traffic, you need to do your best to make your RSS feed as attractive as possible.
Our goal here last month was to improve our own subscriber base, and the results of that experiment has been phenomenal. Here are some quick ideas on how to make your feed more attractive and increase your subscribers:
- Publish FULL RSS feeds
- Make sure users can quickly and conveniently subscribe
- Submit your feed to aggregation services
- Explain RSS to your unfamiliar users
- Post content at a speed your community can keep up with
Manually Improve your Inbound Links
The saying “build it and they will come” could not be any more incorrect in the context of the World Wide Web. If you build it, you need to work hard all the time to make sure your link is out there for new readers to stumble upon. Manually improving your links is a daily chore, but one that is necessary to ensure maximum exposure.
Here are Bookmark Bliss, we’ve tried out many different ways of improving your inbound links. Here are a few ways you can use to your advantage and help let the world know your new site exists:
- Post and submit to high pageranked repositories
- Network with other bloggers to get added to their blogroll
- Submit your posts to article databases
- Submit linkable articles to social news sites
- Use trackbacks by linking to relevant articles in posts
Write Good Content (even Linkable)
While this may seem like and obvious and stupid point, the reality is that many sites take this point for granted. If you want people to link to you and visit on a regular basis, you have to give them a reason. Writing good content can put your site instantly on the map and if your articles have that “linkable” quality they’ll spread like wildfire. Write good articles and back up your facts, and you’ll be off and running with crazy traffic before you know it.
- Write content designed to bring in traffic
- Submit your articles to social bookmarking sites
- Participate in your own discussions and never be afraid to post inflammatory responses
- Deep link your own content to encourage readers to visit your archives
- Make sure 4/5 articles on your site are on topic
If you follow these simple techniques and advice from around the web, you’ll find your traffic increasing by leaps and bounds in no time. If you have other techniques that have worked on your site, drop us a line and let everyone know what worked best in your case. After all, increasing traffic is a daily battle and by working together we can ensure we all succeed in the end.
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2 people have left comments
As usual, it was a pleasure reading a post from your blog, though I think you should add one important technique: “write a post about how to improve your traffic”
Thanks for the tips. It helps a lot.