Generating Traffic On A Budget

Most webmasters keep their prized web traffic generating systems to themselves or charge an arm and a leg. I am one of the guys in the trenches. Before I share with you the simplest and easiest methods to generate website traffic I will begin with a little background information.

I have several websites and in the past ten years I have worked with gurus that promised to deliver traffic to my sites. In fact I have paid from $200 to over $2,000 for traffic to my sites. I had one person that charged a reasonable fee and my traffic went from 500 visitors to 8,000 visitors. Three years later his fee wasn’t that reasonable, but I decided to go ahead and try another website. After three months and two thousand dollars I saw no results.

As many people know the search engines create algorithms so nobody can beat the system. The gurus figure a way around this and charge lots of money to drive traffic to your site. Then the dance continues and the search engines create new algorithms. Next thing you know you are going back to the guru or searching for someone new.

Many of us have been sold a bill of goods about generating traffic to our websites and the lure of getting on the top ten. I can tell you from personal experience that I have been in the top ten and it wasn’t that big of an impact. The hook the gurus use to charge a higher fee is the number of keywords you need to get in the top ten. After a while you’ll realize that ONE keyword may have over one hundred variations.

Working with gurus creates a roller coaster of traffic to your website. Your traffic and sales are dependent on the gurus and the search engines algorithms. When you stop working with the gurus, or their magic isn’t working, your website traffic and sales hit bottom.

Yes there are rewards working with gurus, but you better have a hot site that sells. Start with methods that cost less and allow your traffic to build. Check your status reports to learn more about your visitors and the keywords they used to find you. A good hosting provider will offer this with your hosting package.

A wise marketer once told me that it was best to get off the roller coaster and put my money into methods that build steady website traffic. As an owner of a website, you learn how to update your own pages so you are not dependent on someone to update your website. The same goes for generating website traffic. When you take the time and invest in building traffic on a regular basis, then you will be free from the gurus and the search engines algorithms.

The simplest and time proven techniques that take very little time are your best answers. One method I know you have heard over and over is submitting articles. Let me give you the WHY submitting articles is important. When you are found in the search engines you are just another listing on all those pages. When submitting articles, I get a loyal audience that reads my articles each week. In fact, when they visit another website and see other articles I have written on other topics, it builds more credibility, rapport, link popularity and traffic.

Generating website traffic is using a combination of methods. Submitting to the search engines is still important, but it is only a part of your overall traffic building strategy. With most search engines it may take one to three months to see results.

Now here is the INSIDE INFORMATION most gurus won’t tell you. I am using a traffic generating system that is available to anyone at no cost. In fact it is simple to implement and takes only ten minutes of your time to set-up. This system is instant and you will see an immediate increase in your traffic and it you can verify your results with your own status reports.


About the author:
Wayne McDonald is the TRAFFIC KING! Get your FREE Special Report "Generating Traffic On A Budget" at http://increase-your-website-traffic.holisticwebdirectory.comand for web hosting solutions visit http://webhosting.holisticwebdirectory.com


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Tips on Domain Name Choice

Before buying your domain name, give some thought to the followng:-

1) If possible use your sites name as the basis of your domain name
e.g www.discountdomainsuk.com for Discount Domains UK. This might seem common sense but not every site follows the convention. If you use your name in your URL it will be much easier for your customers to find you.

2) Generic names – if you can register a generic domain such as toys.com that’s great, but most of these have already gone. Also getting ranked in the search engines is likely to be harder. Selected a domain closer to your market segment will cut down the competition. E.g toyplanes.com

3) Hyphenated Names – Its easy to forget the hyphen! Which is the problem, particularly if your customer remembers your name but not your URL. Though on a positive note hyphenated names are less likely to be registered already.

4) If the .com or .co.uk extension is not available then consider the alternative TLD ( Top level domain types) such as .net or .biz. If your domain name has already been registered then approach the owner and ask if they’ll sell. They may accept a £100. If you ask, they can only say no.

5) Plurals. Very often a domain name will be free in the plural but not in the singular form. It’s a personal choice, but if your prefered choice of domain name is not available you might be stuck.

6) Short or Long domains – A short domain name is more memorable, but less likely to be available. A longer domain is harder to remember, but can contain more keywords which is important as some of the search engines, use keywords in a domain name as part of the search algorithm.

7) Which Top Level Domain Type - .com, .co.uk , .net etc This is a question I am often asked. There is no evidence that any domain name type is given preference by the search engines. However some search engines such as Google, have local searches e.g www.google.co.uk which do select local content. Customer often get re-assurance from seeing a local TLD as they know they are dealing with a local company etc. You can, of course, register all of them!

8) Variations – If your prefered domain name is not available then its always worth trying a prefix my e.g mydomains.com or suffix e.g domains4U.com etc


About the author:

Clare Lawrence is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd – A leading UK provider of Domain name registration and Web Hosting services. Please feel free to re-publish this article provided this reference box remains together with a hyperlink to http://www.discountdomainsuk.comClare can also be contacted on clare@discountdomainsuk.com


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How Do I Drive Traffic To A Brand New Website

Every single day, more and more people upload brand new websites to the Internet. I don't have any figures but there must be hundreds of thousands of new pages being added daily (if not considerably more!)

The one thing that all of these new websites need in order to make their existence worthwhile is traffic, which leads me to one of the most common questions I am asked and the subject of this newsletter:

'How can you generate traffic to a brand new website?'

Of course, there are a number of different answers to this question and what I would do myself is probably very different to what a completely new Internet entrepreneur would do. The reason I say this is that the first thing I do when launching a new site is make use of my existing website traffic by advertising the new site on my other established sites. In addition, I have the luxury of a large mailing list which I can use to drive traffic to the new site.

I appreciate that anyone starting out in online business won't have these options open to them (and in fairness, neither did I when I first started), so let's look at things from the beginning. Day one of your first website.....

It is a fact that the quickest and probably most effective way of bringing targeted traffic to your website is by paying for it. Now before you rush off and sink $50 into one of those '50,000 hits for $50' schemes, DON'T, this isn't what I mean. Those schemes are largely a complete waste of money. Even if you get the traffic that you are promised (as opposed to some software script visiting your site and pretending to be a visitor), it will not be targeted and therefore there is a very low chance that the traffic will generate sales. When I talk about buying traffic, I mean by using the pay- per-click services offered by most of the big search engines.

You probably already know the sort of thing I mean - for example, Google Adwords. Pretty much any search on Google will display a list of adverts down the right-hand side of the page and these are all paid adverts. Every time you click on one of them, the advertiser pays Google a fixed amount which could be anything from 5 cents upwards (depending upon how competitive the keyword is).

Pay-per-click allows you to be very selective about which keywords your advert is shown for and this allows you to target your advertising perfectly. Other big names in the pay-per-click market include Overture, Espotting and Findwhat.

Now, before you all start emailing me and saying that you already knew about PPC let me just say that I am well aware that people know about it. The problem (as I see it), is that people aren't using this type of service because of the fact that they don't want to spend any money on advertising. That's all well and good but the fact is that the Internet is getting more and more competitive each day and the chances of you building a successful website business from scratch without investing any money are tiny to say the least.

If you want to attract a decent level of traffic to a brand new website in a short period of time, it is almost a necessity that you use pay-per-click on one of the main search engines. If you don't, then the growth of your traffic levels will be painfully slow and inconsistent at best.

When I launched my very first websites I invested heavily in pay-per-click advertising. At one point, I was spending over $6000 a month on Google Adwords alone!!! Seriously I really was spending that much money. It was a constant battle to tweak the website sales copy and continue to test the advertisement text just to make sure that my sales were covering the advertising payments each month. At the time I was probably just about breaking even but buying traffic in this quantity meant that I was able to fine-tune my sales pages and start to build up a list of mailing list subscribers.

Once you have got to the stage where you know your sales pages are converting visitors into buyers, then you can start to gear up with other methods of getting traffic to your site - writing articles, linking strategies, viral methods (ebooks etc), using your eBay 'About Me' page, using your link as a signature when you post on forums etc. All of these methods will win you traffic (and in most cases it will be completely free) but it will take time for the traffic to build to a worthwhile level. If you rely solely on free traffic, you really will be building your business one hit at a time.

Of course, once the free methods of gaining traffic start to pay off, you can begin to wind down your paid methods, though you may not want to - after all, if you are earning more in sales than you are paying for your pay-per-click traffic, why stop it?

As your portfolio of websites grows, you will also be able to share the traffic around a bit by linking to your own sites and of course, if you are capturing your visitors email addresses, you will be building a mailing list of people interested in the products you are offering.

Like I say, I appreciate that the above may not be the ground-breaking secret that you were hoping for but as with so many things online, there really is no secret. Achieving success is simply about taking action and whilst you can succeed online by spending very little money, the chances are that you will succeed a lot quicker by making a bit of an investment. You don't have to be spending thousands of dollars a month as I was but any new business owner should be prepared to invest a few hundred dollars a month in order to get things off the ground....


About the author:

Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since 1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published every two weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts), visit: http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html


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Introducing The New 2008 Windows Hosting

IIS7 Hosting Solutions
The next generation of the Windows Server

More than just a Web server, Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7) provides a secure, easy to manage platform for developing and reliably hosting Web applications and services. IIS7 is a major enhancement to the Windows Web platform and plays a central role in unifying Microsoft's Web platform technologies - ASP.NET, and Windows Communication Foundation Web services. IIS7 in Windows Server 2008 gives Web developers the ability to rapidly build more compelling Web solutions.

Internet Information Server 7.0 (IIS7) is the next release of Microsoft's flagship web server product. Every online business seeks that little edge to provide them an advantage in the online marketplace and this is that edge. Easy CGI is proud to offer IIS 7 with all shared hosting plans.

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Design vs. SEO: Can My Site Look Good and Rank Well?

Do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic elements of your web site to rank in the search engines? Later in this article I'll show you a real case scenario and the design and SEO approach used.

Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay for such insight. That said, it's certainly possible to employ high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300. However, it's the top of the scale where efforts seem almost inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a tiny change in rank.

How do you meld the ambitious overhauls required to attain significant ranking and NOT compromise the design of your site?

DESIGN CAN'T BE IGNORED
If you have an existing site, you've probably tied it into your existing promotional content. Even if you've allowed your website to cater to the more free form of the net, it should still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business.

The reasons for doing so are valid, and can't simply be ignored for the sake of achieving a first age position, can they? If your research into search optimization leaves you shuffling around thoughts of content, keyword saturated copy and varying link text, you are correctly understanding some of the basic pillars of search engine optimization.

And, you aren't alone if you have this disheartening thought—If I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one across the board, who would stay at my site because it's so stale and boring I'm even embarrassed to send people there!

There are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The first is to be a blue chip and/or Fortune 500 company with multi million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties and giveaways with your logo.

Since chances are that's not you, and certainly not me, lets look at the second option. It begins with some research into your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a designer who is a search engine optimizer, and understands at least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques. Or a combination of people with these skills that can work very well together.

DESIGN IS FOR BROCHURES, INSTANT RESULTS ARE FOR THE WEB
That's not the whole truth, but it will help compare and contrast design and SEO. In reality, SEO needs the quantity and detail of supporting text that a brochure has, but good web design has to catch a viewer's attention in 5 seconds. It's pretty difficult to read and absorb the content of an entire brochure in less than 5 seconds.

Search engines need rich, related, appropriate, changing and poignant content. And for them to rank you, all of that must be on your pages. But if it's not well organized and broken down into bite size chunks, no one is going to bother learning about what you're offering.

CONSTRUCTION 101- ATTRACTIVE DESIGN AND SEO
Sadly, it's very difficult to optimize a site without completely overhauling it. You'll soon understand why. Design and SEO must be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a true, symbiotic relationship. Lets look at a simplified example of this. Lets say you are optimizing a page for the keyword phrase, "pumpkin bread recipe."

From a design standpoint "Pumpkin Bread Recipe" would be the heading for the page, in a nice, readable font with the words perhaps an orange-brown color. And lets add a fine, green rule around it.

There are many ways to create that simple, colored heading. However, there is only one way that is best for both design and SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition, that line of code containing "Pumpkin Bread Recipe" needs to be as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also allows).

To a viewer, the recipe text might be read more if it were located to the right of a photo of a buttered piece of pumpkin bread on a small plate next to a lightly steaming cup of coffee.

SEO needs to read that ingredient list and baking instructions. Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the ingredients are indeed related to the optimized words- pumpkin bread recipe.

Additionally, it would take many extra lines of code to make a table in this example if you didn't use CSS. Search engines don't like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that "extra" code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt rank.

Note: In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you need to get all of that content organized would normally just add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a search engine, that time can really add up. It wont read through page after page, site after site, billionth after billionth character of unimportant code to find the relevant text. Therefore, the less code, the better your chances. Moral- Less code, more content.

SEO USUALLY MEANS REDO
In the previous pumpkin example, CSS will eliminate the need for almost any extra code at all, and provide the means to place the text to the right of the photo.

Now, imagine that someone had already created this page, but done so using other programming methods. The page could very well be W3C compliant, well programmed and got the job done. However, without designing and programming for optimization as in the above illustration, the end result would have no significant rank compared to others that do.

You can be sure that there exist at least 30 web sites built to rank for the keywords "pumpkin bread recipe". Note- why did I use the number 30? It's safe to assume if you're not on the first three results pages of a search, you're not being seen.

While this is a simple example, hopefully you understand that it would be impossible to optimize this simple page without redoing it. This isn't always the case, but extrapolate this into detailed, multiple pages in an entire website and the issue is greatly magnified.


AESTHETIC IMPORTANCE VS. TRAFFIC
Everyone has an idea of what they want their site to look like. The pretty factor- splash pages, cool flash and graphics must now be justified as to their importance to the bottom line. If you want/need to establish an online presence, you will have to make some compromises in these areas.

Understand exactly the role your site should play in your company marketing.

Ask- What is the goal of your website and who is its audience? Is it for existing clients to see? Is it to reach new clients? To venture into yet untapped market segments?

Ask- How strongly do your other marketing efforts promote your site?

Ask- Is your website an extension of your existing collateral that must reflect the same graphical look?

Ask- Is your website meant to assist to your sales force or is it your sales force?

Chances are you wont have any single answers. That's ok. It will give you some meat for your designer/SEO to digest and develop a solution for you.

REAL CASE OF DESIGN BALANCED WITH SEO AND SALABILITY
If you sell jewelry solely online, you must have a catalog of exceptional photography and detailed, high-resolution close up images. But, you must be optimized and rank well if you want to sell any of that jewelry.

If such a company approached me with this project, my recommendation would be this: If you sell a product, people have to see that product. Lots of good images. The site should be slick and sheik and easy to navigate. The home page has to capture the buyer's attention. If it's very expensive jewelry, the site should have a lot of class and elegance. If it's home made jewelry, the site shouldn't look home made.

However, as you have no store front, if the online community can't find you, you're business will fail. So I'd have a very optimized home page with some discussion of the quality of your product, the history of your company, etc. This is also great sales copy. Ad a few special catalog pieces with descriptions below some smartly placed gifs, jpegs and readable type graphics built out of CSS and you've got a cool to look at, content rich, well optimized layout.

I'd make the link to your catalog very obvious and prominent. Note the catalog is not the homepage. I'd also include subsequent well written, in depth pages about the history of some specific pieces. Load them with targeted keywords and a few images. Again, make your catalog link very prominent. In doing so you're creating relevant content for search engines AND providing additional pages that can rank.

The catalog can be database driven, simple and changeable, and you have the foundation to build your search rank.

PLANNING YOUR SITE
If your designer is not a search engine optimizer, hire one to work with your designer from the initial development stage of your site. If you would like a visible presence that is not dependant on traditional marketing efforts to get your name around, then you will have to optimize.

However, with advances in html and css, text itself can be a very flexible and attractive design element with endless possibilities. Site optimization consists of some rigid, unbendable rules. It can be intertwined successfully with very creative and attractive design. If your Designer and SEO aren't the same person or company, make sure they have the same, close working relationship.

About the author:
John Krycek is a creative director at theMouseworks.ca Toronto website design.. Learn more about search engine optimization, internet marketing, web development and graphic design in easy, non-technical, up front English at http://www.themouseworks.ca!


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