Free Traffic

Getting free traffic using traffic exchange programs is widely accepted as not being particularly productive.

The basic idea is you click on a link to my site and I will click on one to yours. Usually there is a minimum time that you need to stay on a site to be credited for the visit, between 15 and 30 seconds depending on the program.

The number of credits you receive again depends on the program and whether or not you are using a free membership option or a paid one. Some programs offer a 1 for 1 ratio, in other words every one of your clicks will get one visit to your site. Others will give you an exchange of say 1.5 to one, so for every 3 clicks you make you will get two visits.

The reason that it is not a very productive is because the people who click on a link to your site generally have no interest in the content. They just want to get more clicks to their site. The problem with this is the high bounce rate. Search engines, like Google do not place that much importance on traffic where visitors only stay on a site for 30 seconds.

If you have a hit counter on your site that is visible to visitors, using a traffic exchange program can make it appear that your site is popular, but in reality the information it displays is false. The visitors that you have received really weren’t interested in your site. OK, you might get the odd few who like what they see and stay for a reasonable amount of time, so it probably won’t do you any harm if you do use them.

A word of warning: If you have Google Adsense on your site, using traffic exchange programs can cause you problems. They may construe clicks on their ads which have been made as a result of visits from a traffic exchange program as contravening their terms and conditions. It is something you should certainly be aware of.

If you want to try using traffic exchange programs, here are just a small selection which have been around for a while.

Eternal Hits They have been around since 2001 and have a referral system which will give you 50 extra clicks for each person you refer plus 20% of your referral credits. Current Google PR of 2 and Alexa rank of 161,436.

I Love Clicks They have been around since 2000. Their referral system offers the following:You will receive 10 credits each time someone signs up using your referral link. Additionally, you will receive 10% of any credits those people purchase.

You will receive 10 credits each time someone signs up underneath one of your referrals, and 10 credit each time someone signs up underneath them. Thus, you earn credits for three levels of referrals. Plus, you receive percentages of all credits that your level 2 and 3 referrals purchase. Current Google PR of 2 and Alexa rank 323,716

Traffic Swarm have been around since 2002. 100 credits for signing up and anything from 1 to 5 credits for clicking a link. Sometimes, you will get a bonus credit of 50. This appears to be random. Current Google PR of 6 and Alexa rank 2607.

Traffis G have been around since 2001. They offer a 1 to 1 exchange rate and a referral scheme to earn you more credits. Current Google PR of 4 and Alexa rank 16,157.

Many of the traffic exchange sites do offer targeted traffic, but usually when people sign up they will choose to accept all ads, whether they are interested in the subject or not.

Although this post is a bit on the negative side, why not give them a try. You never know, this method of getting free traffic may suit you.

Bookmark to:

Getting free traffic requires work. So far we have looked at optimising your website and getting listed in Google.

The next thing is to get some links to your site. I can’t stress strongly enough how important links are, both for ranking and for traffic. There are many ways of doing this and several types of linking strategies.

Types of links:

One way links. Not easy to get as generally people want you to link back to them, but below are a few strategies which you can use.

• Write articles with your website URL in the signature and submit them to article directories. Make sure your content is relevant to what you are promoting, make it interesting and not just a sales pitch, make sure you submit it to relevant directories and it is in the correct section.
• Subscribe to forums and discussion groups which have subject matter which is in line with the content of your website and include your URL in the signature of your posts. Be warned, many forums do not like users who join just for the express purpose of getting linked or posting a sales pitch. Be a useful contributor to the forum and you shouldn’t have any problems.
• Join various social bookmaking sites such as StumbleUpon, Google Bookmarks, Technorati, Netscape etc. Make sure that the content is relevant to the various bookmarking sites you use. If a particular bookmarking site is country specific, for instance Indiapad, don’t use it. Also, don’t just bookmark your own site. Bookmark and review other peoples.
• Join site like Yahoo answers. Answer questions and include your URL in the answer.

Reciprocal links:

Reciprocal links can be very useful in improving the exposure of your website. I would suggest that you search in Google for sites similar to your own which rank highly and email the webmaster asking them if they would be interested in exchanging links. It is important that you add their link to your website along with some descriptive text before you email them. Tell them you have added a link to their website and ask if they would like the description changed in any way. If you are polite and courteous, generally they will respond favourably.

Web Directories:

There are many free web directories, some are content specific while others are more general. The free ones usually require you to provide a reciprocal link to them. A very comprehensive list can be found at One Way Text Link Again, when submitting make sure the directory is suitable for the site you want to add.

Link Exchange Programs:

Many experts feel that link exchange programs are not worth getting involved in. This is because usually the websites that are exchanging links are not relevant to each other. You may be selling “internet widgets”, but the sites who want to exchange with you could be about anything from “absolute rubbish” to “Zen and the art of the Motorcycle”, so not really relevant to your product. Search engines tend not to rate links from these exchanges very highly. Avoid at all costs Link Farms. (If you want to know more about them do a search on Google).

If you do want to use link exchange programs, here are a few you can try.

Telalinks Express Linking Links Pile Bulk Links Link Trade Exchange Linkalizer

Some of these are automatic (you just insert some script on your website) and others are manual (you have to put the link on your links page manually).

That’s all for this session. Next time, traffic exchange programs.

Why not bookmark this blog, or subscribe to it through your favourite blog feed?

Bookmark to:

Getting free traffic to your website isn’t rocket science.

If you have followed the first part of series, you should have optimised you website for the search engines. The next stage is signing up with Google Webmaster tools to let Google know your website exists, and Google Analytics to check where your traffic is coming from. Don’t panic, both of these are totally free and are excellent tools to help you get traffic. I won’t go into a lot of detail on how to do this as the help facility on Google is excellent.

Go to Google Webmaster Tools and create a free account. If you already have a Gmail account, this can be used to access the tools and other Google services.

The first thing you will need to do once you have signed up for Webmaster tools is add a website profile. Once you have added a site, you will then need to verify it and this can be done in one of two ways. You can either add a small piece of HTML to your index page, or simply upload a file to your server with the name that Google specifies and then verify. Once this has been done your website will be scheduled for spidering by the Google bot. In my experience, this usually takes a couple of days, but I have had a blog listed within three hours! While you are signed in with Google, set up your Analytics account. Again, you will need to add a profile for your website and again you will need to add a small piece of javascript to your index page for Google to verify your site. The amount of detailed information you can get from analytics is superb. One tip with Analytics is to exclude your own visits to your site so you get a true picture of your visitors. If you have a fixed IP address, this is very easy to achieve. Bear in mind, this is the IP address of your modem, not your PC. You can easily check this by going to whatsmyip.org

I would also recommend using Firefox as your browser as there are some great extensions that you can use. One of my particular favourites is Customize Google which allows you to have a postition counter in you search results so you can see what position your website is. Also, set your Google Preferences so that you display 100 entries instead of the default 10. This makes it a lot quicker to go through your search results.

Another great addon for Firefox is SearchStatus. This will display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and other SEO tools. Very useful to check your own website and competing websites.

Now all you have to do is wait until your website has been indexed by Google. Probably the best way to check this is to put your domain name in a Google search, in quotes. “internet-widgets.com” (Don’t include the www as this will probably take you straight to your site instead of giving you a results page.) This will show you if you have been listed. Once you know you have been listed, you can then search using your chosen keywords. Firstly do a phrase match search by enclosing your keywords in quotes. “internet widgets”. The try the same thing again with out the quotes.

Until the next time.

Why not bookmark this blog, or subscribe to it through your favourite blog feed?

Bookmark to:

Do you want more traffic to your website? Do you want free traffic to your website?

If you have a website I would guess the answer is YES!! If you have an internet based business, traffic means potential customers. No traffic - No customers. So you have a great website, but if nobody knows it exists all the time and effort you have spent creating it is wasted.

This blog will give you the information and tools to help you increase traffic to your website. As the old saying goes, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Much of the information you will find here is not new and can be found elsewhere, but it won’t cost you anything. Included will be free traffic generation methods and paid traffic generation.

Ok, first tip.

Get you website optimised for the search engines.

If you haven’t already registered your domain name, make sure that you use relevant keywords in it that refer to what you are trying to sell or promote. It is no good having a domain www.fredbloggs.com if you are selling internet widgets. Much better would be www.internet-widgets.com, or www.internetwidgets.com. There are some internet gurus who believe that using a hyphen (-) within a domain name is bad practice as it will be penalised by the search engines. In my experience, this has not been the case. Google for example, just ignores it and picks up the two words either side of the hyphen. It makes more sense to me to separate the words as i believe the search engines would see internetwidgets as one word.

A very useful tool to check for keyword popularity can be found at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/ This tool will check your keyword(s) and give you alternative suggestions. It also does a Google Trends lookup and gives an approximate number of searches based on that keyword(s) together with the number of competing pages. The blue line represents a baseline from which the approximation is made. The red line show the trend of your keyword(s).

Everyone goes on about SEO and makes it sound incredibly complicated. It doesn’t have to be, although you do need to have at least basic knowledge of HTML and an understanding of header tags.

Example:

<head>
<title>Internet Widgets. Your One Stop Source for Internet Widgets.</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”widgets,internet,internet widgets,cheap widgets,widgets for the internet”>
<meta name=”description”content=”Internet Widgets can supply all varieties of widgets for the internet.”>
</head>

In your main body text, in the first paragraph you need to include some of the keywords that people will search for. Try to use keywords that others aren’t using.

Example:

Internet Widgets have the largest stock of widgets for the internet available for immediate download.

Some don’ts:

Don’t use a Flash intro page. Looks great, but the search engines don’t like them.

Don’t use keywords that are not relevant to your website.

Don’t try putting in keywords that are hidden by using a text colour that is the same as your background. You will be penalised for it.

Don’t put too many keywords in your keywords tag.

Use SEO optimisation tools such as the free ones at http://www.submitexpress.com/. Meta Tags Analyzer, Keyword Suggestion Tool and more. These tools will give you excellent information on you keyword density and tips on how to optimise them.

More next time.

Why not bookmark this blog, or subscribe to it through your favourite blog feed?

Bookmark to: