Targeting Conversions and Traffic with Long Tail Writing

As personalized search and universal search continue shaking up an industry that used to be dominated by "top ten results," more and more small businesses are learning the value of focusing on the keyword long tail. While there's no doubting the value of bringing in highly targeted traffic, many companies still don't quite get how to target the long tail in their copy. They also don't know that long tail friendly copy is also user friendly copy.

What is the Long Tail?

If you aren't familiar with the idea behind the keyword long tail, that's ok. It's actually quite simple. In his article on targeting the keyword long tail, Matt Bailey described it this way:

In most cases, the top 10 terms provide a lot of traffic, but not nearly as much as the total terms after the top 10 or 20 most popular. Add up the terms that refer 1-3 visits during the month, and chances are, they will add up to more total visitors than the top terms. On closer examination, most sites will have the majority of their business (sales and leads) generated from these terms that are rarely tracked. This is the heart of the long tail - that the length, or total number of low-number referred terms outnumbers the height, or the total of top 10 terms.

In other words, the terms that are most popular, most managed by site owners, are rarely those that provide the most business. In most studies, the success of the site was from the hundreds or thousands of referrals outside of the most popular terms.

In practical terms, targeting the long tail is about adding descriptive words to your content. If you're targeting widgets, you already know you want to work the word widgets into your content. But have you thought about making sure you are adding words to describe things like size, color and price or actions like buy, review and sample? Good SEO writing is no longer just about creatively and subtly working keywords into your content. Now it's about targeting the long tail by adding less-searched for, yet still important qualifiers to your content.

Targeting the Long Tail Means Better Copy

The great thing about writing for the long tail is the freedom it gives you in terms of writing enticing copy. Natural and descriptive language is an important part of the long tail. With that in mind, let's take a few quick looks at how some simple copy changes make for a better web site AND a better shot at targeting the long tail. I'll put the possible keywords in bold in each instance.

Example: Classic Car Dealership

Original text:

"Joe's Vintage Autos has your dream car! We carry hard to find American cars from the 60's and 70's. Visit our online database and photo gallery to view our latest inventory.

Long tail targeted text:

"Joe's classic car dealership specializes in rare corvette convertibles and muscle cars that harken back to the glory days of American made hot rods. Imagine yourself driving down the highway in a bright yellow 1972 corvette convertible while the wind blows through your hair. That's the dream we deliver here at Joe's classic car dealership. "Search our extensive online database of classic cars, or visit the showroom and take one for a test drive."

Now, you may be thinking "how in the world does she expect to target all those keywords on one page?" The answer is, I don't. In the little snippet above, I'd be actively targeting the phrases "classic car dealership" and "corvette convertibles." But thanks to the use of descriptive words like "rare," "American made," "hot rods," "bright yellow," and "1972" the site would also have a great shot at drawing traffic from really specific keyword searches.

Let's say someone was searching for "1972 corvette convertible car dealer" or "bright yellow classic hot rod." There's a good chance that person would find Joe's Classic Car Dealership in the search results because there won't be very many sites using each and every one of those words on the same page. Since the search term is extremely specific, there's also a good chance Joe's dealership will be getting a highly qualified visitor who may well turn into a buyer.

Example: Local bakery, About us Page

Original text:

Specializing in weddings, our unique creations set us apart from other cake shops. Our staff works with each bride to create the wedding cake of her dreams. We use only the highest quality ingredients and materials, which brides are free to sample!

Long tail targeted text:

The Crumb Shop is located in Hubbard, Ohio and has been creating unique and inspired wedding cakes for Northeast Ohio weddings for more than a decade. Our skilled cake designers spend time working with each bride to create the wedding cake of her dreams. We have existing relationships with banquet halls in Hubbard, Brookfield, Youngstown, Girard and Austintown. We also deliver anywhere in Trumbull and Mahoning counties. We're happy to offer a free tasting and design consultation for local brides in our shop on Main Street in downtown Hubbard. Call 330-555-CAKE to schedule your appointment.

The bakery example has been rewritten with the local long tail in mind. While the majority of people still tend to search on a broader geographic scale (say "Ohio weddings" or "Columbus wedding cake") there are long tail phrases that focus in on specific towns and cities. If you are a local business and you aren't addressing long tail locations in your site copy, you may be passing up potential business. The example above not only targets "wedding cakes" but also targets one state, two counties and five specific cities.

More Traffic and Better Conversions

While it's easy to see how writing for the long tail can ultimately lead to more rankings and highly targeted traffic, it's also important to point out the potential for higher conversions. While it's true that long-tail searchers convert better, it's also true that long-tail optimized copy converts better. All you need to do is go back and review the before and after for Joe's car dealership and you can quickly feel the difference in emotion evoked by each set of copy.

There's a reason marketing agencies employee copywriters. They know good copy draws people in and makes them more likely to buy. A little thought and creativity can make your existing traffic more likely to buy AND can deliver new traffic. What's not to love about that?

Guys Find Advertisers for Your Website

There are diverse ways and things which one can do in order to get people to advertise on your website. This is a means of generation revenue for yourself if you own a website where you publish content. The whole idea of advertising involves people paying you money to promote or market their products and services on your website. There are several ways of finding these merchants who may desire to use your web pages as a marketing platform. Some of these strategies include:

Write Quality Content

The success of most online adverts is related most times to the amount of traffic or visitors to that website. Visitors will only visit a particular site all the time if there is good content for them to benefit from. Whenever the quality of any website content is good, the traffic of that site is always likely to increase and when advertisers see a high volume of traffic, they will be willing to buy advert space on your website.

Increase Your Web Traffic

Another strategy to employ in order to find advertisers is to increase your website traffic. There are several ways to do this. It can be done by writing articles about your website niche area and submitting them to article directories, writing press releases on high ranking press release websites about your products and services and also making use of various social networking sites. All of these places have the potential to bring to your website additional traffic. Once advertisers notice that the number of reader especially mail and feed subscribers is high, they will be willing to pay you to advertise on your site.

Highlight Your Advertising Spots

A lot of people will not know that you are willing to offer advert space until you talk about it. A good way to let people know there is advert space for sale is to leave a sign on the vacant advert box that describes that the space is available to people who want to advertise on the website. You can also make use of other websites to advertise your own website. In doing this, it is important to create an attraction that will make potential customers to come rushing for it. You can offer high discount rates on your advertising or high bonuses for people who will take advantage of it within a particular period of time. The offer prices should revert back to normal rates after the expiration of the bonus period.

Real Resources to Learn About CSS

The resources to learn about CSS can come in different formats. Cascading style sheets is a very significant aspect of web design. Without it a website will not have the uniformity that the various pages of a website normally have. It also ensures that several components of a website are the same. For instance, the font size and font type of a website can be set using CSS and that setting will be maintained all through the web pages. The web designer is saved the pains of having to do the same thing all over again on the various pages. Some of these formats include -:
E-courses
These are lessons or tutorials about CSS that are broken down into lessons that can be sent to people who have subscribed to take such lessons. It can be sent as emails or shared with people learning the program on membership sites. A step by step approach is normally used for the program; beginning from the very fundamental aspects to the advanced aspects of the program. A good time interval is given to ensure that subscribers learn a particular feature that is taught before moving to a new topic. w3schools.com has one of the best CSS courses around.
Videos
This resource is for people who learn faster with videos and audio visuals. The lessons can be produced in videos too; which may comprise of the very basic fundamental aspects of CSS to the advanced lessons. The benefits or an advantage of using of this type of resource is quite obvious. A subscriber does not have to read a manual or lesson over and over again before they can understand a particular step. All they have to do is to watch it and listen to the instructions that are given. They can replay any step several times as much as they like in order to understand it. Visit CSSVideos.com to get some video tutorials.
PDF/DTP EBooks
Portable document format (PDF) and digital text platform (DTP) are document formats that have become very popular nowadays especially among users of portable mobile devices. CSS learning resources can be created in these formats to cater for this group of people. The various lessons can be created and converted to these document types so that the users can easily make use of it on the go when learning this very important aspect of web design. For instance, this will be a very good resource for users of Kindle mobile reading device. There is already an estimated figure of about over a million users of the device presently. Here’s a collection of CSS ebooks to get you started.

Guys Find Content Writers for Your Website

There are several ways to find content writers for your website today. Some of these methods may cost you some money while some of them may not even cost you a dime. One of the critical factors to look out for should be the ability of the writer to be efficient in delivering the content that you want according to your specifications. Some of the methods of finding content writers include -:

Offer Guest Writing Opportunities

Writing content for your website consistently all the time can be very tedious, and sometimes you may just want to find somebody to help you. There are usually people who are looking for recognition, or people who may desire to get a favour such as link exchange with your website by writing content for you as a guest writer. You can make use of guest writers to do your content work. All you may have to do is to leave an announcement on your site for people who may be interested.

Engage Services of Ghost Writers on Job Boards

Another method to find content writers is to hire writers from writing job boards that are all over the internet. The issue here is that you may not know the capabilities of the person you are hiring unless you do a thorough job of testing such people with trial jobs before hiring them finally to write for you. Most of these writers who are not professionals do not charge much, but many professional writers charge more.

Request for Other Expert Writers to Write for You

Similarly, another simple method to find content writers for your website may just be to approach other people who are themselves experts in that area. But you must describe to them very well your writing style; just so they do not write something else entirely different from the existing content on your website. This method may however, cost you some small money.

Create a Competition to Get Best Writers to Write for You

A website owner can also create a small competition for writing among writers and other readers. The winner or people who performed very well in the competition can be hired to write for you. You can also make arrangements to give them what they may need, it must not necessary be money. The website owner should ensure that the content produced by this is good before publishing it.

2+1 Tools to Estimate the Traffic of Any Website

There are several tools by with which one can utilize to monitor and determine the amount of traffic or visitors to a website. There are several actions or parameters that can be monitored with these tools. Though some of the tools are limited with regards to the actions they can perform, most of them can do a lot of things.
Some of these tools are also subscription based whereas others are not. The ones that are free normally come with the webhosting platform or service. The data or information generated by these tools is normally presented in very simple easy to understand formats that even people who do not know much about the web administration can interpret it easily.

1. Webalizer

This tool is usually part of the features of the back end of any webhosting service or plan. It monitors and reports the amount of visitors the website receives all the time. This data is then later presented in reports that are easy to read and understand. From the reports, one can see the amount of traffic that visited the website on an hourly, daily, weekly and monthly basis. There are also functionalities to help you present the information in the form of pictograms. For instance, the number of visitors for a particular period of time can be presented in the form of bar charts, pie charts, line charts etc.

2. StatCounter

Another tool that is also very important in the estimation of website visitors is known as StatCounter. It can be found at StatCounter.com, there is a free version as well as a subscription based version. This tool makes the whole task to very effective and a lot easier to optimize your website for maximum results. One can use this tool to trace where the website visitors are coming from i.e. the website sending traffic to your website, the pages the visitors get to see first when they come, the duration of their visit to your website, the keywords that they were searching for (i.e. if they came from search engines), and even the geographical location of the visitor.

3. Alexa

This is another tool that is similar to statscounter. The only difference is that Alexa get the demographic data of all the website visitors. It provides discrete information about the visitors such as the gender, occupations, income levels or ranges, educational status and the keywords that are being searched the most. All of these information are useful to webmasters in several ways. This tool can be found at alexa.com and it is not subscription based.

Guys Find Broken Links On Your Website

Broken links are nothing more than links inside your website that point to pages that don’t exist. This includes both links to pages inside your own website and links to pages on other websites. What is the cause of a broken link? The maybe the page you linked to existed in the past but got deleted, maybe you simply used the wrong URL when creating the link. Regardless of the reason, whenever a user clicks on one of those links he will see a frustrating 404 error page.
It is easy to see how broken links can negatively affect the user experience inside your site. Apart from annoying your human visitors, though, broken links also upset search engine bots, and if your site has too many of them, your search rankings might suffer. This is because Google will assume that any website with a large amount of broken links is a poor quality or abandoned website.
For these reasons it’s recommended that you check for broken links on your site at least twice a year.
Now if you have a large blog or website it would be impossible to check all the links manually right? Luckily there is a great tool that you can use for this purpose, called Xenu’s Link Sleuth, or simply Xenu.

Don’t worry. You won’t need to pay anything. Just download it and install on your computer (it only runs on Windows). The design of the site is horrible, but it is a legitimate project.
Once you have the tool running, just type the URL of your website and it will start crawling all the links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, and so on.
You will be able to follow the process, and in the end you will see a report with all the broken links, redirects, valid URLs and more.
It is really a nifty piece of software, and a must have on the tool-belt of any webmaster.

Search Engine Optimization Basics

Search engine optimization basically involves the use of various kinds of techniques to make the website rank high in search results for certain search engine queries. Webmasters normally take this aspect of web management very seriously because it determines to a very large extent the amount of traffic that will come to their website. Some of the diverse strategies and techniques that are used to achieve this goal include the following:
Keywords
Webmasters usually target some specific keywords by which their website can be identified with. There are various tools that can be used to get or find keywords that are used for searching websites. These tools normally collect data for the various search queries that are conducted on search engines and when anybody requests for particular keywords; search terms that are all related to that request and the frequency of such searches are all provided in the report. This helps website owners to know which of the words to optimize their website for in order to get good traffic from search engines.
Linking
Another technique that is a serious criterion for search engine optimization is the number of website that link to a website and the number of website links from a website to other similar websites especially those that are in the same niche area. This is one of the things that make search engines to rank a website very high. Webmasters normally employ different strategies to ensure that their websites have good quality links coming to their website and from their websites. Some of these strategies include -: blog commenting, directory submissions, guest posting or blogging, etc.
Domain Names and Age
Domain names and the age of such domains is another crucial fundamental factor in search engine optimization. When a webmaster wants their website to rank high for a particular keyword, they always try to include it in the domain name. By doing this the search engines are likely to pick it and include them in reports easily when people run a search for that keyword. It is often stated that top level domains (i.e. domains that end with a dot com) are often recognised above any other domain. And using websites that are hosted on a free service is not a good strategy for getting high search engine ranking. The age of a domain is also a critical factor as it tends to show how long the domain has been running. It is considered as the years of experience of the domain. Hence, the higher the age; the better it is for the ranking results.

Promote Your Website with Google Adwords

Google Adwords is an online advert campaign program where some selected keywords are used to attract traffic to a particular website. The keywords must be related to the niche of the website being promoted. It is something that is easy to do, yet it can become complicated especially if you are not very conversant with the basic concepts of online advertising. The following steps will be helpful in starting an online campaign with Google Adwords -:

Pick Keywords that are Relevant to Your Website

It is important to pick or select keywords that are relevant to your website’s niche. This can easily be gotten by visiting the Google Adwords web page, and then you type in a keyword related to your niche area and submit. The website’s engine then quickly does a search from the words people are searching for from the search engine and produces a long list of results containing all the related keywords and the magnitude of search carried out on them. It is always better to pick keywords with low competition, and focus your web content on them in order to rank easily for such keywords.

Write Attention Provoking Headings

Another thing one will be required to do when promoting a website with Google Adwords is to create an advert display which will be published for people to click on. The headings for such displays must be attention grabbing for people to be attracted to it and eventually click on the headings. One simple trick most people have been using is to use action words to make people click on the adverts that are being shown to them.

Create Action Specific Content

It is one thing to do headings that are attractive but the attraction alone may not be enough. Prospective visitors who are viewing these adverts will need to be further convinced the more for them to leave what they are doing to click on the adverts. One of the easiest ways of convincing these people to click on the advert is to write about some benefits that the person stands to get if they click on the advert. The word count for this is usually limited so the choice of words is also very important. It is also very important for the website content to be optimized with the targeted keywords and good quality content in order to be able to keep visitors when they eventually get to your advertised web page.

Guys Find Advertisers for Your Website

There are diverse ways and things which one can do in order to get people to advertise on your website. This is a means of generation revenue for yourself if you own a website where you publish content. The whole idea of advertising involves people paying you money to promote or market their products and services on your website. There are several ways of finding these merchants who may desire to use your web pages as a marketing platform. Some of these strategies include:

Write Quality Content

The success of most online adverts is related most times to the amount of traffic or visitors to that website. Visitors will only visit a particular site all the time if there is good content for them to benefit from. Whenever the quality of any website content is good, the traffic of that site is always likely to increase and when advertisers see a high volume of traffic, they will be willing to buy advert space on your website.

Increase Your Web Traffic

Another strategy to employ in order to find advertisers is to increase your website traffic. There are several ways to do this. It can be done by writing articles about your website niche area and submitting them to article directories, writing press releases on high ranking press release websites about your products and services and also making use of various social networking sites. All of these places have the potential to bring to your website additional traffic. Once advertisers notice that the number of reader especially mail and feed subscribers is high, they will be willing to pay you to advertise on your site.

Highlight Your Advertising Spots

A lot of people will not know that you are willing to offer advert space until you talk about it. A good way to let people know there is advert space for sale is to leave a sign on the vacant advert box that describes that the space is available to people who want to advertise on the website. You can also make use of other websites to advertise your own website. In doing this, it is important to create an attraction that will make potential customers to come rushing for it. You can offer high discount rates on your advertising or high bonuses for people who will take advantage of it within a particular period of time. The offer prices should revert back to normal rates after the expiration of the bonus period.

Try 30 Awesome Tools To Find Available Domain Names

As you probably heard, domain names are the real state of the 21st century. Whether you want to build a personal blog of a startup company, the first step will be to find a good and available domain name. The task is not an easy one, but with the help of the 30 tools we listed below we are sure you’ll manage it!

1. 123Finder

This website offers a wide range of domain search tools. Particularly useful are the lists of available domains. For example, you can view lists of available domains with 5, 6, 7 and 8 characters, and use filters to refine the results.

2. Domain Name Soup

A complete suite of domain name search tools. Here you’ll find word manipulation tools, random domain generators, tools to search for domains with a specific length and so on.

3. SaveSpell

SaveSpell offers a database of domains that expired recently. On the homepage you’ll find the list of the most recent expired domains, and you can also use the search function and filters to refine the results.

4. Scoratic

Very interesting tool that allows you to find domains about to expire. You can choose the date to look for, and the tool will even order the list according to an internal quality score. Notice that you might need to wait some days before the domains listed here become available.

5. StuckDomains

Just like thousands of domains are registered every day, thousand others are not renewed by their owners and become available in the market again. With StuckDomains you can search for these dropped domains using keywords or other filters.

6. NameStation

Looking for a brandable domain? This tool is what you need. It creates a list of random words, and checks whether the respective domain is available or not. You can specify the length of the words and what characters should be used.

7. NXDom

This tool will generate hundreds of domain ideas for you. You just need to specify how the domains should start and/or, and the tool will output the suggestions in real time.

8. Wordoid

A wordoid is a made-up word that looks and feels like a real one. This tool will generate dozens of wordoids for you, and they can be great to name a startup or Web 2.0 company.

9. Instant Domain Search

This tool enables you to see which domains are registered and which are available as you type them in the search box, letter by letter. It checks the .com, .net and .org extensions.

10. Ajax Whois

Another real time domain research tool. It works similarly to Instant Domain Search, but it has more features. For example, it allows you to search more extensions, and it also has an iPhone app and a Firefox extension.

11. Psychic Whois

With Psychic Whois you can also see the available domains in real time, but it creates a list of suggestions as you type the letter.

12. Domize

Domize works like the other real time search tools, with one difference: it will break down the word you input. If you type “marketing”, for example, the tool will check the availability of mar.com, mark.com, marke.com, market.com, marketi.com, marketin.com and marketing.com (it also checks the .net, .org and .biz extensions).

13. BustAName

One of the best domain research tools on the Internet. Simply insert any number of keywords, prefixes, or suffixes, and the service will mix and match them for you, revealing what domains are available out of the formed combinations.

14. AptDomain

AptDomain will mix and match words for you, just like Bust A Name. The difference is that each words has a “Synonyms” link you can click to explore and add the synonyms of that word to the list.

15. NameBoy

A basic tool that offers domain name ideas. All you need to do is type in a primary keyword (and a secondary one if you want), and it will display a list with relevant domain names, highlighting which extensions of the domain are registered and which are available.

16. Xona Domain Hacks

A domain hack is a trick used to form a word by combining both the domain name and its extension. Examples include bla.st (blast), del.icio.us (delicious), and blo.gs (blogs). Once you input a keyword, this tool will automatically create the domain hacks for you with extensions from around the world.

17. DomainTyper

This tool works like other real time domain searchers, but apart from checking the normal domains it will also list for you the available domain hacks. As a bonus there is a Web 2.0 domain generator tool on the left side.

18. Domai.nr

Another tool that will create domain hacks for you. Domai.nr is supposed to search among 280 top level extensions and 2,014 second level ones.

19. DomainsBot

This tool operates like a domain name search engine. After you type in some keywords it will create a list of related domains for you. The more keywords you include, the bigger the list. You can also use filters to refine the results.

20. GoDaddy Bulk Search

This tool offered by GoDaddy is really useful if you want to research a large amount of domains at the same time. You can list up to 500 words in the input box, and choose from a wide range of extensions (e.g., .co, .me, .asia, .mx). After that hit “Search” and the tool will tell you which domains are available.

21. Dot-o-mator

The tool allows you to choose a set of pre-defined prefixes and suffixes, and then it will mix and match them for you, checking if the resulting domains are available or not. You can also add your own prefixes and suffixes.

22. Domain Tools Suggestions

Domain Tools offers a wide range of tools for domain owners. If you are looking for available domain names, however, you should check the “Domain Suggestions” one. Simply input a keyword and the tool will create a large list of domain suggestions for you.

23. Domain Exposer

This tool will automatically add adjectives, nouns, business words and other categories of words to your specified keyword. You can also select the starting and ending characters, as well as the length of the domain.

24. Shout Domains

This website offers two interesting tools: Domain Word Combiner and Domain Word Cruncher. The first one will combine words (e.g., adjectives, prefixes and suffixes) to your chosen keyword, while the second tool will make up words for you. The results are displayed in a real time list on the right side.

25. EuroDNS

If you are looking to get domains with foreign extensions, this tool is just what you need. It can search for domains with extensions on Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and Oceania.

26. Domain Fellow

Simply select a keyword, a category, and whether you want to add prefixes or suffixes. The tool will do the rest for you, creating a list with hundreds of domain suggestions.

27. dyyo.com

Short domains tend to be very valuable, and that is why all the 3-letter domains are already gone. There are still some 4-letter domains available, though, and this tool will help you find them.

28. Readable Domains

This tool will help you find 5-letter domains instead. You just need to insert a base domain (e.g., zoloc.com) and the tool will swap the vowels for you and check if the resulting words are available domains or not.

29. Domain Pigeon

If you are going to build a website you’ll probably create a Twitter account for it too, right? Domain Pigeon will help you on this task, and it has a lit of available domain names where the respective Twitter user name is also available.

30. Company Name Generator

Another tool you can use to generate Web 2.0 and startup names. You just need to click on “Generate” and one company name will be suggested to you, along with its status (i.e., whether it is available or not).

Do you know How To Get Your Website On Google

Most Internet users rely on Google and other search engines to find information online. If you are building a website, therefore, it is very important to get your site listed on those search engines. But how do you achieve that? In this article will explain the two options you have.

Direct Submission – Not Effective Anymore

Virtually all search engines have a direct submission option. That is, they have a specific page where you can go and submit the URL of your website, to notify the search engine about its existence.
You can visit Google’s submission page to see an example.
When search engines first appeared, this method was the best one, because the search index was created almost manually. These days, however, search engines rely on automated web crawlers and algorithms to index the web almost in real time, so the direct submission is no longer an efficient option.
In fact here is what Google says on its submission page: “We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.”
Moreover, there is the fact that most low quality and spam websites resort to the direct submission, hoping it will help them to appear on Google. That is why search engines pick the websites that get submitted to them with a grain of salt.

Getting Backlinks – The Best Way

As we mentioned above, these days search engines have a very sophisticated technology to crawl and index the web. They are capable of discovering new links in a matter of hours, and if that link points to a website that is not in their index yet, they’ll add it on the fly.
That is why the best way to get your website listed on Google is to get other websites linking to your own site (when another site links to yours it is called a backlink). If you manage to get an authoritative site on your niche to link to your site, Google will probably index you within 24 hours. Even if you just get links from average sites, you should still be included in Google’s index within 48 to 72 hours.
Not sure how to get backlinks? Here are some simple methods you can use:

1. Ask Friends to Link to Your Website

If you have friends who have their own websites or blogs, ask them to link to your website. They could write a post recommending your website to their readers, for example, or simply include a link to your website on their sidebar.

2. Submit Your Website to Web Directories

Getting your website listed on web directories won’t send you much traffic, and it won’t give you fantastic search rankings either, but it should be enough to let Google discover and index your website. Here is a list with hundreds of web directories you can use.

3. Submit Content to Article Directories

When you submit an article to a directory, it will publish the article on its website, including an author byline. You are allowed to include a link to your website on that byline, and that is how you can get backlinks by submitting content to these directories. Here is a list with the top 50 article directories on the web.

4. Join Online Forums and Put A Link To Your Site on the Signature

Most online forums allow their members to create a signature, and you can also include a link to your website on that signature. After you create your member account and setup your signature, therefore, it will be a matter of writing posts in the forum, and each post will count as a backlink. You can use the Big-Boards.com site to find online forums in your niche.

Checking If Your Site Is Indexed

Once you get some backlinks to your website and wait a couple of days, how do you check to see if the site is already indexed or not?
The right way to do it is to use the “site:” parameter on Google. That is, search for “site:yourdomainname.com” on Google. If your website is already indexed, the first result should be your homepage, and the other results represent the internal pages that Google also indexed from your site. Here is a screenshot of this search query for our own website:

The Sandbox Effect

One common mistake webmasters make is to search on Google for the name of their website, expecting to find it there right away. When they don’t, they freak out and start thinking that something is wrong.
For example, let’s suppose that you just launched a website called SuperCars.com. You put some content there, get some backlinks, and then you use the “site:” parameter to see if it is indexed. It is. You then search on Google for “super cars,” hoping to find your site there, but it is nowhere to be found, even when you look on the second, third and fourth page of results.
Is there something wrong here? No. This is a perfectly normal pattern, and people call it “the sandbox effect.”
Google basically has a separate index, the sandbox, where it places all newly discovered websites. When websites are on the sandbox, they won’t appear in the search results for normal search queries, like “super cars.” Why is that? Because Google still needs to evaluate whether the website is legitimate or not (i.e., that it has unique content, that it doesn’t have spam or malicious content and so on).
Once Google verifies that the website is legitimate, it will move it out of the sandbox and into the main index. That is when the site will start ranking for normal search queries, and that is when the owner of SuperCars.com would be able to find its website when searching for “super cars.”
How long does it take to get out of the sandbox? It varies from site to site. Sometimes it happens in one month, other times it takes three or four months.
The best way to make sure you’ll get out of the sandbox as soon as possible is to keep publishing unique content on your site to keep getting backlinks from quality and relevant websites.

More than 99 Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic

Traffic is the currency of the web. The more traffic your website has, the easier it will be to achieve your objective, be it to make money, to spread your ideas, to connect with other people or anything else.
That is why we decided to create a compilation with 100 ways you can use to increase your website traffic. Apply some (or most) of them and we are sure your numbers will go up!

Blogs

1. Add a blog to your website. If your website is static (e.g., a corporate site or an online store), consider adding a blog to it, where you’ll write new content regularly. This will give your visitors a reason to come back, and your search engine traffic will increase too. If you need a blog software, check out WordPress (it is free and easy to use).
2. Leave comments on other blogs. Develop the habit of visiting blogs inside your niche and leaving comments on them. You can include a link to your website on each comment, and some visitors will certainly come through those links. You can use Alltop to find blogs in any niche.
3. Write guest posts. Most blogs accept guest posts. That is, they allow you to write a post for them, and usually the post carries an author byline with a link to your website. Simply send your article to the blog owner and ask whether or not he wants to publish it as a guest post.
4. Sponsor blog contests. Another common practice around the blogosphere are contests. You can sponsor one by donating products or money, and the blogger will link to your website from the contest page. 
5. Join a blog carnival. Blog carnivals are online events where bloggers get together to write about one specific topic. The host of the carnival will them write a round-up post linking to all the participant entries, and participants usually link to each others’ entries as well. You can organize one with your friends, or browse for existing ones at BlogCarnival.com.
6. Network, network, network. Ever heard the saying “it is not about what you know, but who you know”? It applies to promoting a website as well. If you become a friend with a blogger or website owner, he will be much more likely to link to your website and send traffic your way. A good way to achieve this is to link to other bloggers first and to establish a relationship via email.

Subscribers

7. Publish an RSS feed. Once you publish an RSS feed your visitors will be able to subscribe to your website using an RSS reader. After that whenever you publish new content they will receive it automatically, which is a great way to keep these visitors engaged with your content and visiting your website regularly.
8. Use Feedburner. If you want to get the most out of your RSS feed you should sign-up for a Feedburner account. It is completely free, and you’ll get a wide range of features, including statistics about your subscribers, customization options and so on. Feedburner will also make your RSS feed compatible with most browsers and RSS readers, so you won’t lose any subscribers due to technical problems.
9. Offer email subscriptions. Many Internet users still don’t use RSS, so offering an email subscription to your content is a must. Fortunately it is very easy to do this once you have a Feedburner account. You just need to activate this feature under “Publicize,” and then copy and paste the subscription link on your website.
10. Create an email newsletter. You can take your email subscription option one step further and create an email newsletter. This will give you more control regarding the messages you send to your subscribers. For example, you could create an auto-responder sequence, sending specific messages at specific time intervals to your new subscribers. You’ll need an email marketing software to manage your newsletter, and you can use Aweber for that (it is a paid solution).

Content is King

11. Break a news story. If your website is the first to talk about a news story it will receive many links from other sites who will cover it as well, and your traffic will increase as a result.
12. Write a controversial article. If you manage to write something controversial, people will talk about and link to your article, either because they agree with you or, most likely, because they disagree. The result will be a lot of traffic.
13. Write a “Top 10″ list. Internet users love “Top 10″ lists, because they are easy to digest and contain useful stuff (i.e., 10 resources, 10 tips, and so on).
14. Write a “Top 100″ list. If “Top 10″ lists are good for traffic generation, “Top 100″ ones are great. This article is an example. People will bookmark and share your “Top 100″ list naturally because of the value it packs together.
15. Write a “Definitive guide” to something. People love to learn new things, especially if such things will solve some of their problems. Make sure to make your guide as complete as possible, and visitors will flock to read it.
16. Publish an interview. This strategy works even better if the interviewee has a blog or website, as he might link to the interview and send his readers to your site.
17. Leverage holidays and seasonal events. You can drastically increase your traffic if you publish content related to big holidays and seasonal events. Examples include Christmas, elections, Olympic games, the World Cup and so on.

Linkbaits

19. Create a quiz. People love quizzes, and if you create an interesting one your traffic might increase as visitors both take the quiz and share the results with their friends. You can use ProProfs.com to create your quiz.
19. Create a ranking of people. For example, publish a ranking with the “50 Hottest Female Entrepreneurs.” Such rankings tend to get a lot of traffic because it plays with people’s ego.
20. Create a ranking of websites. A similar strategy is to create a ranking of websites, say the “25 Best Weight Loss Blogs.” The owners of the sites mentioned are likely to link to your article (especially if you contact them to let them know about it, thus sending your traffic.
21. Publish a funny image. At the end of the day, people just want to have a good laugh. Publishing a funny image is a good way to help them with that, and it might increase your traffic at the same time. Want some inspiration? Check the Pics section on Reddit.
22. Create an infographic. If you are creative and like to research, then you should try creating infographics, as they tend to attract many links and traffic. Here is a tutorial that will help you to create one.

Freebies

23. Release an eBook. This is one of the most efficient ways to generate traffic. Simply write a compelling eBook, and then release it on your website. Include a direct download link, and email bloggers and webmasters in your niche to let them know about it. The better the information in your eBook, the more people will share and recommend it, and the more traffic you’ll gain.
24. Create a free CSS template. CSS templates are very popular around the web, and if you submit yours to CSS directories many people will end up using it. Include a footer link to your website and you’ll surely get some traffic.
25. Create a free WordPress theme. You can also transform your CSS template into a WordPress theme (or create a new theme from scratch). WordPress is used by millions of users, and many people will download your theme if you submit it to directories (including the Official Themes Directory).
26. Release a cheat sheet. Cheat sheets are very popular on the web, and if you create one you’ll certainly see a bump in the number of website visits. If you want to see some examples, check this article listing 25 useful cheat sheets for web developers.
27. Create web design resources. The web design community is one of the most active online, and creating resources for them is a good way to increase your traffic. Examples include icon sets, fonts, textures, Photoshop brushes and the like.

Contests

28. Launch a retweet contest. You can launch a contest where people need to retweet the contest page in order to get an entry to the random draw. The prize can be either money or products and services from your sponsors. Depending on the size of your prize the retweets could go viral after a while.
29. Launch a comment contest. An alternative contest format is to ask people to leave a comment on your contest post in order to get an entry. This will increase your traffic because your RSS and email subscribers will need to visit your website to leave a comment, and it will stimulate them to comment on your posts more often.
30. Launch a review contest. If you want to increase your search rankings you could launch a contest where people need to write about the content in order to get an entry. The links you’ll get will send you both Google juice and new visitors. Keep in mind that you need a good prize to motivate people to write about your contest though.
31. Launch a voting contest. You basically need to create a contest where the winner will be picked with a voting session. Suppose you have a fitness website. You could invite your readers to submit their best fitness tip, and then a voting session would decide which tip gets the prize. This would motivate participants to link to the voting session and to encourage their friends to visit your website and vote.
32. Launch a traffic contest. If traffic is what you want, why not be direct about it? You can launch a contest where people need to send traffic to one particular page inside your website. It could be the contest page (for a viral effect) or a resource page (e.g., a page where you give away an ebook). After the established time frame (e.g., 2 weeks, 1 month or anything else), you’ll simply need to check your web analytics to see which websites sent you more visitors, and then award the prizes.

Multimedia

33 Experiment with video. As you probably heard, video is huge on the web right now. If you are not experimenting with it yet, you should. If you want to do something simple, just record yourself talking in front of the web cam (obviously what you are talking about should be interesting to your visitors, as opposed to some general rambling).
34. Create screencasts. A very efficient way to create compelling videos is to record your computer screen while you perform some task. For instance, you could use it teach other people how to use the computer or how to do things on the Internet. You can use a free software called CamStudio to create your screencasts.
35. Submit your videos to multiple sites. Once you have your videos ready to go, you should spread them on as many video websites as possible, and not just on YouTube. Luckily there is a site that can help you do that without spending too much time at it. It is called TubeMogul.com, and it automates much of the submission process for you.
36. Launch a podcast. This could be a good traffic generator for one main reason: there isn’t much competition out there as far as podcasts go. In other words, as long as you put some effort into it, your podcast could become the leader inside your niche quite fast. All you need is a USB microphone to start recording.
37. Release audio interviews. We already mentioned that interviews are good for traffic. Apart from text interviews, however, you can also release audio interviews. Skype makes it really easy to record one. You’ll just need to use a software to record your Skype conversation. PowerGramo has a free version that works well.

Social Bookmarking Sites

38. Get people to stumble your articles. If you have friends using Stumble Upon, ask them to stumble your best articles. This should get the ball rolling, and if other Stumble Upon users like your content it might receive a lot of traffic from it.
39. Try to reach Digg’s front page. Reaching Digg‘s front page is quite difficult, but it is worth a try, because once you manage it you’ll receive tens of thousands of visitors. You should start by becoming an active Digg user, trying to make as many friends as possible and to understand the kind of content that works there. Once you have these two things, get a friend to submit one of your best stories, and get your network of contacts to vote on it.
40. Submit your content to Reddit. If you fail to get success with Digg, try Reddit. It works in a similar way, but it is smaller and has a more friendly community, so your content might do better there. Funny stuff, technology and politics are topics particularly suitable for the site.
41. Get your visitors to bookmark your articles on Delicious. If you publish many how-to articles and tutorials, Delicious could be a good traffic generator for your website. Simply add a Delicious icon below your articles, try to get some friends to bookmark your articles as soon as they get published. If you get enough bookmarks in a short period of time your article might get promoted to Delicious front page.
42. Include social bookmarking icons on your site. You can increase the number of votes and bookmarks you’ll get by including social bookmarking icons on your site. You can use this generator to create the icons automatically and paste the code on your website.
43. Try niche social bookmarking sites. The four social bookmarking sites mentioned above are the largest ones on the web, but there is also a wide range of smaller, niche focused bookmarking sites that can send you some traffic. Here is a list with 83 of them. Simply join the ones related to your niche and check how much traffic they can send you.

Social Networks

44. Create a profile on most social networks. When you create a profile on a social network, you are usually able to include the URL of your website. Guess what? This is a link building opportunity, and it might increase your traffic (both because of the visitors you’ll get and because of the link juice). Mashable has a list with over 350 social networks, so use that to get started.
45. Start using Facebook. If you want to generate social media traffic, you must have a presence on Facebook. The very least you should do is to create an account there and network with as many people as possible. After you’ll be able to generate traffic by posting links to your website on your Facebook stream.
46. Create a Facebook fan page. Another great way to leverage Facebook is to create a Fan page. This is basically a page dedicated to your website, where your visitors can become fans, leave comments and so on. Here is a tutorial to help you create your first Fan page.
47. Include a Facebook “Like” button on your site. Facebook recently introduced the “Like” button, which you can embed on your site to let your users share your content through their Facebook accounts. Getting the button is just a matter of copying and pasting some lines of code. Here is the page where you can get it.
48. Start using Twitter. Another must have social network is Twitter. You can create an account for yourself, or one for your website directly, where you’ll post updates with links to your recent posts and related content from around the web.
49. Include a Tweetmeme button on your site. By including a Tweetmeme button on your website you’ll allow your visitors to retweet your posts and pages with a single click, which can increase the traffic you’ll receive from Twitter.
50. Explore niche social networks. You problably won’t get as much traffic from niche social networks as you will from Facebook and Twitter. But you should still give them a shot, because the traffic will be much more targeted. Here is a list with 233 social networks divided by niche.

Website Optimization

51. Customize your 404 error page. Whether you like it or not people will get 404 errors on your website. Maybe they will misspell your URLs, maybe someone will link to an inexistent page inside your website, and so on. If you use a normal 404 error page, visitors will simply move on to another website. If you customize your 404 error page to include some useful links, however, you’ll channel these visitors to other parts of your site, thus increasing your traffic.
52. Interlink your pages. This strategy will increase your traffic in two ways. First of all it will allow your visitors to explore your website more easily, increasing the number of pages views per visit. Secondly, it will also improve your search rankings because your link juice will be distributed among all pages of your website.
53. Highlight your most popular content. People like to know “what is hot” when they are visiting a website. You can increase the number of page views you’ll get per visitor if you highlight your popular content and encourage them to read it. The easiest way to achieve this is to create a “Popular Articles” section on your sidebar.
54. Test your website in different browsers. If web users can’t visualize your website properly they’ll just move on to another site. That is why you need to make sure that your site works fine on the most popular browsers. There is an online service called Browsershots.org that can help you with that, and it is completely free.
55. Speed up your website. There are many research papers confirming that most Internet users will only wait a couple of seconds for a web page to load. If it doesn’t, they will close it and move to another website. On top of that search engines also use the loading speed as a ranking factor, so the faster your site loads, the higher your search rankings. The first thing you should do to improve your loading speed is to remove unnecessary elements from your site and to reduce the size of your images. You can use the Firebug extension for Firefox to perform a more detailed analysis of your loading speed.
56. Serve cached pages. A very efficient way to improve the loading speed of your pages is to serve cached versions to your visitors. This will also reduce the load on your web server, and make your site more responsive. WordPress users can install a plugin called WP Super Cache to achieve this.
57. Get a decent hosting plan. No matter how much your optimize your website, however, it will still load slowly if your hosting plan is mediocre to begin with. That is why you should stay away from free and cheap web hosts. Investment $10 per month to get a quality hosting plan is a must.

Search Engine Optimization

58. Create unique content. If you want to receive search engine traffic and only had time to work on one thing, you should work on creating unique content for your website. This is what Google and company values most. The more unique content you have, and the more frequently you publish new stuff, the better.
59. Build backlinks. The second most important thing you can do to improve your search rankings and receive organic traffic is to build backlinks. That is, you need to have as many websites linking to you as possible. The higher the quality and relevancy of these links, the better. If you have a tech blog, for example, getting a link from TechCrunch or some other authoritative tech site would do wonders to your SEO.
60. Perform keyword research. Search engines work around keywords, and if you understand the keywords that people use you can tailor your content to match that. For example, the term “funny pictures” is 15 times more searched than the term “funny images,” so you probably should use that in a post title . You can use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to discover the search volume of any keyword.
61. Optimize your title tags. The title tag is the title of your pages. It goes inside the <title></title> tags in the header of your HTML code, and it is displayed on top of the browser when visiting your page. This is a very important on-page SEO factor. You should make sure that you have a unique title tag on each page of your site, and that your main keywords are present there. WordPress users can install the All in One SEO Pack plugin to achieve this automatically.
62. Build an HTML sitemap. An HTML sitemap is basically a page inside your website linking to all other pages (and preferably being linked from all other pages too). The HTML sitemap helps search engines to crawl and index your website, thus increasing your search rankings.
63 Use images. Most webmasters forget that Google has a feature called “Image search,” which is quite popular. This means that by using images inside your pages you can increase the amount of search engine traffic you get. Just make sure to optimize the name of your images with relevant keywords, and always include an ALT and a TITLE attribute in your image tags. You can use the sxc.hu website to find thousands of royalty free images to use on your website.
64. Translate your content. Depending on the topic of your website, translating your pages into other languages could multiply your search engine traffic. In order to achieve this you need a plugin that will get your translated pages indexed by search engines. WordPress users can use one called Global Translator.

Mobile

65. Create a mobile version of your website. As more and more users start accessing the web through mobile devices, it becomes important to have a version of your website that works perfectly these new platforms. If you are using WordPress you can install a plugin called WPTouch to create a mobile version automatically.
66. Create an iPhone app for your website. iPhone is arguable the most popular smartphone around, and most of its users rely heavily on apps to consume their content. If you create an iPhone app to display the content of your website you could both get new readers and allow your current ones to read your stuff on their iPhones. There is an open source project that will help you do this for free.
67. Create an Android app for your website. Google’s mobile operating system, called Android, is quickly catching up, so you could create a website app for it as well. You’ll need some coding knowledge for this though.

Online Forums

68. Join online forums and put a link to your website in your signature. Regardless of the topic of your website, you’ll certainly find dozens of related online forums to join. Most of them allow you to put a link in your signature, and you can use that to send visitors to your own website. If you need help to find online forums, check Big-Boards.com, as they have a database of thousands of forums divided by categories.
69. Link to your articles from post threads. Apart from putting a link to your website in your signature, you can also link to your articles when writing forum posts. For example, if you just wrote a post that is useful to other forum members, you could start a thread letting them know about it, and asking for feedback. Just make sure to do this when your article is relevant, else you might get flagged as a spammer.
70. Join the Craigslist forums. If you browse on Craigslist (the most popular classifieds site on the web) you’ll notice that inside each city there is a “Discussion forums” section. You can write posts there, and include links to your website whenever relevant to the discussion.
71. Consider adding a Forum to your site. Once your website reach a critical mass of users (i.e., 5,000 daily unique visitors or more) you could consider adding a Forum to it. This will give your visitors a place to ask questions and contribute content, while increasing your traffic. phpBB is a reliable and free Forum software you can use.

Content Hubs

72. Create “lenses” on Squidoo. Each “lens” on Squidoo is an overview page about a specific topic. Creating lenses is free, and you can include any kind of information on them, including links to your own website.
73. Create a “hub” on HubPages. A very similar site is called HubPages. You can create “hubs” about specific topics, and include links to your website there. Just make sure to read the site guidelines, to make sure your hubs will be published.
74. Answer to questions on Yahoo! Answers. Spend some time browsing the questions on Yahoo! Answers, and whenever you come across one related to the topic of your site, answer it. You can include a link to your website as an additional resource, or to a specific article inside your site that answers the question too.
75. Answer to questions on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Answers is another platform where you can answer to questions from other users and include a link to your own website or articles. Keep in mind that topics gravitate around career and business here.

Old School

76. Submit your site to web directories. The amount of traffic you’ll get from this tactic depends on the quality of the web directories that will accept you. If you submit to hundreds of them, however, the traffic might build up. Here is a list with hundreds of web directories, organized by Google PageRank.
77. Submit your blog to blog directories. If you have a blog, you can also submit to blog directories (i.e., web directories that only list blogs). This article lists 50 of them to get you started.
78. Submit content to article directories. Article marketing is a very common and effective way to increase your traffic. You basically need to submit your articles to article directories. Virtually all of them allow you to include a link back to your site, and that is how your traffic will increase. Here is a list with the 50 most popular article directories on the web.
79. Exchange links. The practice of exchanging links is as old as the web, but that is so because it works. You just need to be careful to only exchange links with sites that have unique content and are relevant to your visitors (else Google might get upset).
80. Use ad swaps. A similar strategy is to use ad swaps. That is, you use your unused ad space to promote the website of your partner, and he does the same with his unused ad space. The ad itself could be anything, from a banner spot to an email message to your newsletter.
81. Distribute a press release. Creating and distributing a press release can still send some traffic to your website, especially if you have something new in your segment. You can pay companies like PRWeb to do most of the work for you, or you can submit the press release manually (here is a list with 50 sites you can submit to).
82. Include your website’s URL in your email signature. Email is the most used communication channel these days, and as such you should use it to let your contacts know about your website.

Paid Methods

83. Google AdWords. Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most efficient ways to buy traffic for your website, and Google AdWords is the largest ad network for that on the web. Creating an account is free, and then you’ll need to bid on keywords. Depending on your niche it is possible to buy clicks for as low as some pennies.
84. Facebook ads. The best alternative to Google AdWords is the Facebook Ads platform. You’ll be able to pay both per click and per 1,000 impressions, and you can also target very specific demographics, to make sure the visitors will be interested in your content.
85. StumbleUpon ads. If your content performs well on social media you could try StumbleUpon ads. Your website (or a specific page inside it) will basically be displayed to StumbleUpon users, with a cost of $0.05 per view. If many users vote positively on your content you’ll also receive some free traffic.
86. Reddit sponsored links. Another social bookmarking site where you can buy ads on is Reddit. You’ll basically create a sponsored link that will be featured on the homepage, and Reddit users will be able to vote it up or down.
87. Purchase banner ads directly. Virtually any website owner is willing to sell banner ads. If you find a website that is closely related to yours, therefore, you could contacts the owner asking how much he would charge for a banner ad. The return on the investment might be high here, because the visitors that will come will be likely to stick around and become loyal readers of your site.
88. Purchase banner ads through networks. There are ad networks that might also help you purchase banner ads, paying a flat monthly fee. BuySellAds.com is a large one with a really big inventory of websites.
89. Purchase sponsored reviews. Sometimes sponsored reviews work better for traffic generation, because your website will be featured inside a post (i.e., it will be exposed directly to the readers of the other site). If you want to buy a sponsored review you could either contact the website owner directly, or browse through the marketplace of sites like SponsoredReviews.com (make sure the sponsored links will have the nofollow attribute, else Google might get pissed).

Offline Methods

90. Tell your friends and family about your website. These folks are certainly going to be interested in checking your website out, and if you put new content there frequently, they might keep coming back.
91. Tell your co-workers about your website. This is another group of people that will be interested in visiting your website at least one. If the content of your website is somewhat related to your work this strategy will work even better.
92. Include your website’s URL in your business card. If you give business cards away frequently, consider including your website’s URL there. Professional contacts might be interested in visiting it after all.
93. Print your website’s URL in some T-shirts. It is very easy and cheap to get custom T-shirts these days (just Google it), so getting some with your website’s URL could be a nice way to spread the word about it.
94. Create stickers with your website’s URL and spread them around. If you really want to go guerilla, get some stickers with your website’s URL and spread them around. Cars, windows, computers, you name it!
95. Put an ad at a local newspaper. Depending on the niche of your website, getting an ad on a local newspaper could be a good investment. For example, if you have a blog about local news or events an ad on the local newspaper could definitely bring you some new readers.

Out of the box Methods

96. Come up with an April Fools’ prank. The first of April is a very lively day on the Internet, where many companies and webmasters come up with funny pranks. If you come up with a funny or interesting one other website owners might link to your, sending you traffic. You can check TechCrunch’s summary of the 2010 pranks for inspiration.
97. Set your website as the homepage on any computer you use. If you apply this tactic consistently it might actually bring good results. For instance, you could set your website as the homepage of all computers in your school, work, libraries and so on.
98. Navigate to your website on computer stores. This might not bring you a lot of traffic, but it sure is a funny tactic. Whenever you go to a store with computers being showcased, open the web browser and navigate to your website, so that people passing by will see it.
99. List your website for sale. Even if you are not planning to sell it, that is. The interested buyers will visit your website to check it out, and that is how you’ll increase your traffic. If you list your site on popular marketplaces, like Flippa.com, you might actually get thousand of visitors (and possible some good offers!).
100. Fake a hacker attack. The community of bloggers and webmasters gets in turmoil every time a website or blog gets hacked. If you fake such an attack (i.e., by putting a weird message in your homepage) you’ll certainly receive many backlinks and a bump in traffic. People might get pissed if they find out it was a prank, though.
Don’t have a website yet? Then check our main tutorial. It is a step by step guide that will help you get your own website up and running today!

Beginner’s SEO Basics Guide

Earlier this year, I wrote a post called “The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter Basics” about how to use Twitter if you’re brand new to the platform. Month after month, it is one of the highest-trafficked posts here on the BlogWorld blog. You know what that tells me? It tells me that sometimes I forget that a lot of people have no experience with blogging and social media and are craving 101-level posts.
So today, I wanted to tackle another topic that seems difficult from the eyes of a newbie: search engine optimization, or SEO. If you want to learn SEO from the experts so that you have the top rank on Google for any keyword you choose, this is not the place for you. However, I think that if you’re a blogger that doesn’t know a darn thing about SEO, you’re doing yourself a great disservice. If you just take a moment to learn the basics, you can get your blog in front of a lot more eyeballs! And no, you don’t have to jeopardize your content to do it.

What is SEO? Why Should I Care?

One of the first things I did as a new freelance writer back in 2005ish was google “What is SEO?” I had no clue, but a lot of my clients were asking if I was skilled in that department, and I wanted to be able to say yes! If you have no idea what SEO is or why you should care, don’t worry. We were all in that boat at one time.
Think about  how your website gets traffic. Some people come to your blog when others retweet or like or otherwise share your links through social media sites. Some people come to your blog when it is linked in another blogger’s post or sidebar. Some people are regular readers or perhaps even subscribed to you RSS feed. But chances are that a large percentage of your traffic comes from search engines. SEO (again, that stands for search engine optimization) is your way of making your blog as visible as possible on search engines so that the people who could most benefit from or who will most enjoy what you write actually find you.
You’ll hear the word keyword thrown around a lot when talking about SEO. This is essentially the word (or words) someone types into a search engine when looking for something. So, think about the keywords your target audience are using. When they search for those keywords, you want your site to pop up as high as possible on the results list. Makes sense, right? The higher you are on the results list, the more likely readers will click through to your site.
As an example, let’s say you blog about movies and you were writing a review of Toy Story 3. You might want to optimize your post so that people searching for “Toy Story 3 reviews” and “reviews of Toy Story” and maybe even “Pixar movie reviews” see your site on page one of their search engine results list.
Good SEO can mean a lot of traffic to your blog. Even just the bare minimum can mean that you show up in the search results on page one whereas before you were on page 17.

Fact: SEO advice is always changing.

One of the most annoying things about SEO is that it is forever changing. What worked back in 2001 isn’t going to work today, ten years later. Heck, what worked last week might not work today. Search engines change the way they rate sites (their algorithm) constantly because if they didn’t, people would just game the system as much as possible.
So if you’re reading this ten years from now…sorry, dude. I suspect the information here is a little outdated! The same might be true a week from now. But I’ve tried to include tips that are as evergreen as possible. These are the basics, the building blocks of good SEO. It’s the bare minimum you should be doing if you want search engine traffic.

Making Your Website SEO Friendly

First and foremost, make sure that your overall website is friendly for search engines. Have you ever seen what the code of your website looks like? If you don’t know HTML, it looks like a mess, right? Well, essentially, that’s what a search engine sees. Kind of like the matrix, but without Keanu Reeves. In other words, a search engine doesn’t see pictures or your fancy site design. Those things might be great for your users, but you want to make sure search engines can index your site as well.
If you use WordPress or another popular blogging platform, chances are that you don’t have to do much to ensure your site is visible and easily picked up by search engines. Make sure your navigation makes sense (something you want to do anyway for your readers) and avoid too much javascript or a silly flash intro that search engines can’t understand. Create a few static pages to serve as anchors on your website, include some sitemap options (like an archives page or menu), change your options so that your permalinks are “pretty” (i.e., not just a bunch of random letters or numbers), and update often. Pretty easy, right?
Oh, and when picking your domain name, think about SEO. Branding is important too, of course, but if the URL of your homepage has nothing to do with your site’s topic, SEO will be a little more difficult. There’s a reason why RealEstate.com is higher on the list than Zillow.com for the keyword real estate, even though both sites are extremely relevant to someone searching for that term.

Individual Post SEO

The easiest way to make sure your individual posts are optimized for search engines is to download a free plugin to help you do just that. I like the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress, but there are lots of options. Some themes also have an SEO option built in. These plugins help you easily change the meta information for the post – basically, what a search engine sees rather than what the reader sees. For a title, you want to write what the post is about in as few words as possible, using a keyword that makes sense for the post if you can. For a description, type just that – a description of the post about the length of a Tweet, that uses keywords. For keywords…type your keywords. That’s pretty easy too, right?
So, going back to our example of a post with your review of Toy Story 3, even though you might think up some kind of clever title for the actual post, you’d probably want your SEO options to be something like:

• Title: Toy Story 3 Movie Review
• Description: Movie review of Toy Story 3 with discussion of Tim Allen as Buzz and Tom Hanks as Woody. Should you see Toy Story 3 with your kids? Read Toy Story movie opinions.
• Keywords: Toy Story 3, Toy Story, Toy Story 3 movie review, Pixar movie review, Woody in Toy Story, Buzz in Toy Story, movie reviews

Essentially, your keywords can be the same as your post’s tags. Make sure you include tags and also categorize your posts well, as this will help with overall site SEO.
As you’re typing your post, be conscious of the keywords someone would use to find your post and sprinkle them as it makes sense. You don’t have to change your writing style much and you definitely shouldn’t stuff your post with keywords (this could actually hurt you), but as you’re writing, just keep keywords in mind and use them where they make sense. People have written entire websites and books about how to best use keywords; but again, I’m not an expert and the rules change a lot, so unless you’re passionate about SEO and have the time to invest in learning it, start with the basics of just “using keywords where they make sense.”
A few other quick tips:

• Name your pictures. Nobody is searching for “IMG1290812″ but lots of people are searching “Woody in Toy Story 3.”
• If the title of your post is something crazy that is interesting but does not include your keywords, consider changing the permalink. Instead of yoursite.com/super-awesome-kids-movie-that-is-lightyears-ahead-of-the-rest, change it to yoursite.com/toy-story-3-movie-review.
• Link to old posts within your new posts. When you add the link, do so with a keyword that makes sense, not just “click here.” Don’t overdo this and link to dozens of posts in the matter of a a single paragraph, but try to link to yourself at least once a post.

SEO and Links

One of the best things you can do for SEO is something you should be doing anyway – write awesome posts. If your content is awesome, people will link to you within their own posts, on social media sites, in comments, and more, and links are extremely valuable. When a search engine sees a link on someone else’s site to one of your post, they think, “Oh, so that blogger found this post interesting/informative/worthy enough to add a link on their own site? It must be good!”
That’s how I imagine computers think, anyway, if we could hear their inner monologues.
Basically, it’s a vote for your site, kind of like a thumbs up on Facebook. The more “votes” your site has via links, the better! And if you write great content, you’re naturally going to have more people linking to you. So if you do nothing else, blow us away with what you have to say so people share your link as much as possible.
Hope that gets you started with SEO. If you’re experienced with this topic, I hope you’ll leave your best top for beginners below as a comment to help us newbies learn more!