Four Free Strategies to Increasing Your Websites Traffic

Driving targeted traffic to your website is essential in order to bring in the sales necessary to create an income online. Using these four techniques, you will not only directly drive traffic to your site, but at the same time, you will be creating an effective strategy to gain higher placement in the major search engines infinitely increase your websites traffic. . .and all for free!

Article Submission

Submitting articles to article directories is fast becoming one of the most popular and effective ways to market your website online, and for many reasons. By writing articles about specific topics that relate to your website you are establishing yourself as an expert in the field. You will also have the opportunity to add a link to your website in the author or resource box, driving traffic to your site. Another key advantage is that websites looking for content will have the opportunity to place your article, with the link to your website, on their site. These links will stay on their website for years. Over time this creates a large number of links to your site, increasing your page rank and visibility in search engines.

Forum Participation

Regularly participating in forums can also establish you as an expert in your field. By participating in forums that are related to your website, you gain the trust of the other forums users. Trust in you and your website will result in more traffic and sales. When participating in forums be sure to add a link to your website in your signature file. This will let readers know where your website is located, and also create more links on the internet to your site.

Create Your Own Blog

Another effective way of building trust and becoming an authority on your websites topic is to launch your own blog. Blogs are also frequently picked up by search engines since the content on them is usually fresh and up to date giving you exposure to your target market. Also, by publishing your articles on your blog will also create more links back to your website, increasing the page rank of your website as well.

Linking Campaign

By creating a linking campaign, you can dramatically increase the number of links on the internet that direct users to your site. As demonstrated in the above strategies, the more links that point back to site, the higher your page rank, and the higher listing in search engines resulting in more targeted traffic. Linking is easy, yet can be time consuming. For sites that offer links simply use your favorite search engine, and use keywords such as add your link. You will see that millions of sites are available to add your link to.

About The Author
To find the best home based business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home visit: http://www.HomeBusinessOnTheNet.net

Article Marketing: Danger Signs

Marketing your articles is a fantastic way to gain needed exposure on the internet. Article directories are being introduced at a breakneck pace, but they are not all equal. In fact, listing your articles on some sites can be nothing but a waste of your time and could cause you to lose your valuable reputation. How so? Read on for more information.

One of the nicest compliments I have been paid is when a manager of an article directory approaches me to submit articles to his or her new site. Generally, this happens when they have discovered that I list a large number of articles to a high quality site, such as Ezine Articles, and realize that I have the ability to produce articles in spades.

Truthfully, I am very selective about joining new sites and only do so after examining how the site is set up and whether it is received by members of the article marketing community. The following list contains some of the danger signs of article directories that do not quite measure up:

No contact information. I want the person who manages the article directory to be personality driven. A little self promotion goes a long way! Sure, if they dont have what they say they have, it will soon become apparent that they are blowing in the wind. If it isnt possible to uncover the personality behind the directory, chances are they really arent that involved with the day to day operations.

No blog, no forum. Talk to me! Literally speaking. A blog and/or a forum are necessary parts of a successful article directory site, in my opinion. I want to get the article directory owners input on article marketing, and I want to leave a comment when inspired. Those article directories that encourage active participation are certainly the high achieving sites. Their success means your successplain and simple!

Feed it to them. Yes, a news feed that includes the articles submitted to the site is a must. RSS is a terrific way to maximize article exposure. I give article directories that have this feature an edge over all others as it tells me that they are serious about article marketing.

Statistically speaking. What, no stats?! If you cannot measure how many people have viewed your articles, downloaded the same, emailed them to someone, or left a comment, I have no use for you. Article marketing = statistics. You cannot possibly measure the success of what you write without some sort of feedback. Stats provide it!

Page rank. I want the article directory to pull down a Google page rank of at least 5. Heck, if my own article site can pull down a PR6, then I would expect an article directory to do at least the same! I give new sites 2 or 3 months to get their page rank up before deciding whether to submit to them or not.

Things I look for that are pluses: press releases; preservation of back links; easy submission of articles; approval within 48 hours; circulation of my articles via Google; a contact form to get a hold of the directory manager; continual growth of the site; and introduction of relevant new features to attract authors, content seekers, and the like.

Any site that fails to measure up is, in my opinion, a bad neighborhood. You wouldnt want to live in a bad neighborhood, so why would you feature your high quality articles there as well? Your reputation is golden; submit only to those sites that can enhance your reputation not lessen it.

Copyright 2005 -- Matthew Keegan is The Article Writer who writes on a variety of topics including: advocacy, automobiles, aviation, business, Christian themes, family, news, product reviews, travel, writing, and more. Samples from his portfolio are available right online.

Should You Consider Article Marketing To Promote Your Online Business?

Article marketing is a really powerful and simple way to get more traffic to your websites, blog and other squidoo lenses. While it is true that content is king, this traffic generation method is very slow when you compare it to pay per click advertising for example.

The question that marketers ask is "Is this worth your time?".

My take on this is that whether or not you don't think it's worth your time, you should submit articles at least once a week. Sure, one article a week is not going to increase your traffic and profits anytime soon, but at least, you get your name out there.

This is one of the numerous advantages of writing and submitting articles. And if you have the budget, you can outsource this to a ghostwriter or virtual assistant. Plus you will get top rankings in the search engines if you add the right anchor text in your bio box. Keep in mind that article marketing is not a one time "set and forget" technique.

In fact, the more articles you write, the more effective the method. If you consider article marketing as an integral part of your overall marketing plan, you need to write at least one article a day.

Anyone really serious about his online business is involved in article marketing because of the instant credibility, instant traffic and instant sales.

Plus it is a good way to add new leads to your marketing funnel. Those leads are generally more targeted than those you can get in free giveaway events or other safelists and traffic exchanges.

To learn more, download my Free Guide: "How To Earn $100K Per Year With Article Marketing".

Franck Silvestre makes thousands of dollars a year from affiliate and article marketing. Wonder what the secret to his success is? Discover how he does it at: http://www.mynetmarketingland.com/article-marketing/

Article Marketing-The Two Ways to Do Article Marketing

Article marketing is such a hot area online right now, and of course I like that, but I like even more the idea that it is basically fad proof. You see, the problem with most of the fads online, especially the ones that make people a lot of money, end up being automated and the cat is let out of the bag, and everybody and their uncle starts doing the fad, and after awhile it is burnt out and there is very little money left in the fad.

The thing about article marketing is that it is basically fad proof. The reason for this is that article writing cannot be automated by computers. Sure, content can be automated, but not real articles. And it is real articles that make article marketing happen. Well, at least the first half of the equation.

Real articles are the root to article generated traffic, traffic that comes directly from the article directories. People have to read the articles, and click through and if the article is some computer generated junk, then they arent going to click through. So that half is fad proof at least.

Now, the second way is that of generating backlinks by writing articles and submitting them to article directories.

Now, this has tendencies to becoming a fad, but the problem is, if the content is just computer generated, the search engines tend to eventually ban the content, so articles submitted to article directories that accept computer generated articles generally will not get indexed correctly for the article marketing purposes. This makes article marketing by sheer hard work very attractive for the person who is not chasing one get-rich-quick scheme after another, and wants to generate long term internet income.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 700 articles in print and 9 published ebooks.

Virus Deadlier Than Bird Flu Found in Internet Marketing!

There are many ways to increase the amount of traffic to your website, and one of the most effective methods is known as viral marketing. To use viral marketing to it's fullest potential, you'll want to employ many different techniques into the marketing plan of your site. Some include great looking graphics, pre written emails, integration marketing strategies, pre-written articles and blog posts, etc.

All of the above will help to increase the traffic to your site by offering incentive for your existing members so they will do the work for you. But one of the best and under-utilized viral techniques of them all is by providing a simple way for your existing members to tell their friends about your product or service. Trusted endorsements by friends is the best form of advertising bar-none. And what's even better is it costs nothing to implement.

Many tell-a-friend scripts have came out and have been effective to a certain degree, but they lacked the features necessary to cause a viral wave of traffic that we'd all love to experience on our sites. Well, the same guy who created the most incredible Viral Marketing script that has revolutionized the internet marketing industry and made viral marketing easy for virtually everyone has just created a new tool that has been responsible for over $209,349 in extra sales just from two beta testers using it in it's raw form.

The marketer is Mike Filsaime, and the new tool is Viral Friend Generator. He just launched the completed version and I am thoroughly impressed. Viral Friend Generator is the next evolution in tell-a-friend technology. In less than five minutes (the time it takes you to fill in the form and upload to your server)... you can literally multiply the number of visitors and subscribers your web site receives by 300% or higher!

It is compatible with all of the major autoresponder services out there and has many incredible features that every other tell-a-friend script just cannot compete with at all.

Put your marketing efforts into high gear with this extremely powerful new and easy to use tool that was put together by the Viral Marketing Expert of experts, Mike Filsaime.

If you want to read some great case studies with real results from this report go to http://www.SuccessViral.com

Dave is a motivational, nlp, internet marketing coach and blogging strategist. He shares a lot of important Internet marketing strategies at http://www.SuccessEnroute.com He is giving away free ebook at http://www.InternetBizGuru.com

What Is Waiting for Us? Tomorrow's SEO Industry

Today, SEO is swiftly approaching saturation point. More and more webmasters realise the necessity of learning SEO basics, and as they do so, SEO professionals are facing difficulties finding new clients. With all the niche sites optimised, it will be harder to compete for good key phrases. Link building opportunities will be easily found and utilised by everyone, keyword density will reach its optimum value, meaning that the SERPs will consist of equally good and equally relevant sites - at least from the traditional SEO point of view.

Spammy techniques, still popular and sometimes even effective, will exhaust themselves even quicker. There are, really, not so many different methods of deceiving the search engines and increasing a site's relevancy artificially; today they just differ in details. Perhaps it explains why we don't see spammy sites in the SERPs as often as we used to - our smart spiders catch them quite soon and throw this low-rate stuff away to keep the web cleaner. As soon as spiders become smart enough to recognise spam on the fly, the particular class of "SEO specialists" propagating such rubbish will find themselves out of their jobs. It is not really hard to tell an ugly doorway from the real thing.

So who will survive? What is the way to tomorrow in SEO science?

First of all, we should monitor and analyse the latest tendencies, then extrapolate them and make good guesses on how things may look in the future. Finally, we put them to test using logic and common sense.

This will show us the true answers and help us compete when the time comes to offering ground-breaking SEO services that exploit the new qualities of search engines.

And common sense tells us that the core purpose of the search engines will never change. They are supposed to deliver the best results they can. If they are not always so good at it today, it is often explained by their restricted resources; but that will change over time.

The search engines of the future will be capable of reading JavaScript, CSS, Flash and other things that are invisible to them now. It is technically possible already, but requires more complicated algorithms and more bandwidth, so they are not so eager to implement it just yet. They prefer to sacrifice additional capabilities in favour of spiders' speed and the freshness of their indices. But as the technical factors improve, SEs will improve and create new sensations every day, all the more so since they always have to compete with each other.

Thus, JavaScript links will count. CSS spam will be easily detected and banned. Flash sites will become a new niche for SEO specialists - at the moment they require an HTML version to subject to search engine optimisation.

But these changes are not the most important ones. Link popularity analysis algorithms are sure to become more sophisticated - and capable of analysing the "likeliness" of one or another link pattern given the information on a site's age, size and content. That will mean death to link schemes, link farms, pyramids, automated submissions, and numerous links with the same anchor text - and, perhaps, shake the basis of the today's reciprocal linking strategies. Relevancy will mean more, and in cases of complementary businesses linking their sites to each other, search engines will become capable of seeing if they are really complementary, not just pretending to be so.

Also, sites written in different languages but relevant in theme will be translated on the fly and count as relevant - which perfectly fits the worldwide tendency of forming international businesses. That makes international SEO companies more likely to survive.

And, most important, search engines will become capable of analysing context. Google is already playing with stemming and buying semantic packages; synonym analysis and related words (i.e. affordable services - low prices - tight budget - financial flexibility - and, perhaps, even small business package in the same row) won't take long to come.

That will bring revolution to the whole SEO copywriting industry. Today the SEO copywriter's skills are determined by his/her ability to include targeted keywords in the SEO copy without breaking its readability; in most cases it is bound to reduce the quality of the text, unless you hire a very capable writer. Tomorrow, exact keyword matches will be less important. That will make the copywriters' work easier in some ways - and harder in others. It could be hard to part with the habits acquired over time and develop totally new approaches and methods.

But the Net will benefit from it.

Those who want to make their SEO copy flexible and artistic might lose points today, but will win tomorrow. And that will be the end for doorways - completely and irreversibly.

Be prepared to accept new SEO This is the only advice that seems reasonable. My forecast may not be precise, but today's tendencies have already confirmed that this course of events is the likely one.

So, when optimising your site today, think of its contextual relevancy. Of course, include your targeted keywords - but also make sure the overall subject of the site reinforces the point. Do not be afraid of synonyms and related words: they will make your copy more natural and attractive today, and are very likely to make it more relevant tomorrow.

When building links today, vary your titles and descriptions from directory to directory and from link partner to link partner. Throw away all the automated submitters; do it manually. It is hard and time-consuming, but it is also a reliable and strong method of protecting your site from future algorithm whims. It means quality; and I strongly believe that quality will never betray you.

And never stop learning. Visit forums, read fresh articles, exchange opinions with other SEO professionals. Never assume you know everything.

And never be satisfied. It is only inquiring minds that will win in the end.

More on Topic:

There is a new king on the horizon by Rob Sullivan

Are Keywords Destroying the Flow of Your SEO Copy? by Karon Thackston

Search Engines Can Read Macromedia FLASH SDK by Jim Hedger

About The Author

Irina, Ponomareva, 32. I joined Magic Web Solutions ltd. (UK), Dartford, Kent, on March 2003. I've been acting as a web master, a developer, and an SEO specialist ever since.

After practising search engine optimisation for a year I then launched Spider Friendly (http://www.spiderfriendly.co.uk) - the autonomous SEO branch of Magic Web Solutions (UK) offering SEO/SEM services - in co-operation with my colleague Dmitry Antonoff.

irina@spiderfriendly.co.uk