10 Golden Rules of Website Traffic

Do you want to increase website traffic?
A key factor in website traffic success is Search engine optimizing - but there are other factors to consider. We talk from our website traffic experience - our network sites are visited by over 12.000 unique visitors per day. 72% of these visitors came from search engines like Google and Yahoo. We reached this website traffic success because we follow the 10 rules below.

	Analyze your Market Analyse your market. For example you want to make or you maintain a site about helicopters and want to drive website traffic to the site. Go out and seek other sites with the same theme. Is it difficult to compete against them? Do you like features of the other sites? What is missing? Make a pro and contra list of the features of the other sites. Take the good ideas. Avoid things you dislike. Add your own ideas.
	Simple Webdesign Make your website simple, not overloaded - that's the success of sites with high website traffic like Google and others. Use simple HTML-Code search robots can read easily. Your HTML-Code should work with logical tags: <html>...<h1>Mainheader</h1> Intro... <h2>Subheader</h2> Paragraph 1...</html>. Use CSS Stylesheet files to format your tags. Also most visitors enjoy simple designs and a straight navigation. It's not required, but for a free style sheet based Dropdown navigation I recommend Suckerfish dropdowns. Here is a nice example. Even this must be considered to build a strong userbase and have more website traffic.
	Create Strong Content This is not only a point for search engines. Your visitors should enjoy your website and read a lot. This is important for gaining more website traffic. Write a lot of valueable content. This is the most time consuming part of your website. After 50 or 100 pages you'll also see free website traffic. Your site will get bigger and bigger. Visitors will recognize your site as a reference. Search engines will rank your page higher - this will increase website traffic. The chance to be deep linked from other sites or search engines is much higher - this is another point to increase website traffic. But be careful. Don't use duplicate content from other sites. Google and others will penalize this.
	Submit your Site Submit your site to Google (link) and Yahoo (link) to raise website traffic. Submit your site to a public directory like dmoz.org to generate website traffic. This may take some weeks. There are tools out there that can help you to submit your site to other directories, but please be careful. If the tool you choose is an agressive submittor, this will have a negative effect for your website. Your website traffic may go down. You may be penalized by some directories. A tool we recommend is IBusinessPromoter (IBP). IBP has reveived a lot of good ratings from different sites and is proven to boost website traffic.
	Build Networks Very important. Contact webmasters of the sites of your niche to exchange links to raise website traffic. If you want to appear on another site, that is bigger than yours, we recommend the following: Write an extra page or review page of the other website. Be honest. The webmaster of the other site will see, that you made a nice extra page for him with relevant keywords for him and a lot of links to his site. Chances to get listed on his website and increase website traffic are a lot better now. Repeat this with at least 10 other pages to build a network of important sites. Google will give your site a better PageRank with better positions and therefore more website traffic. Consider a 3-way-link-exchange for better rankings and higher website traffic. It works very good. That means: You have 2 "helicopter" domains. You set a link from your secondary "helicopter" domain to your competitor and you ask your competitor to set a link to your main "helicopter" site. Both webmasters will profit from more website traffic.
	Be Communicative Take any chance to communicate your URL to increase website traffic. Read and write a lot in forums, that write about the topics covered on your site. In our example a "Helicopter Forum" is ideal to raise website traffic. It is very important that you have your URL's in your signature. Post valueable discussion content and be helpful. Other webmasters will respect you and add your sites. Add your URL's to your eMail signature. Write your URL on your car, bike, shirt, whatever to increase website traffic. Buy 2 or 3 lines in your favourite helicopter magazine for a few bucks and post your URL there to generate website traffic. No idea is too crazy.
	Update your site Fresh content is very important for Google and other search engines to drive website traffic to your site. You will have to update your site every 1 or 2 weeks. Do not leave your site alone for half a year! Every update will help you to stay on your position or gain a better search engine ranking - and this means more website traffic. I recommend a "News" section where archived news can be stored. It's legitimate to post links to other news messages - but write a short summary in your own words before you link to an external news page.
	Monitor your site Of course you have to monitor how many visitory came to your site and how they found the way to your site. Improve the best working link partnerships to improve website traffic. Open a free Google Analytics account and insert the javascript tracking code on your site. Monitor the daily visitory and the "Traffic Sources" section. On the "search engines" section you can see which keywords your visitors entered to reach your site and how this keyword over the last weeks and months or from which sites they came. Even if you decide to buy website traffic with Google Adwords - Google Analytics will help you a lot to track the performance. With Google Webmaster Tools you can monitor your average position of your keywords in the Google search results to improve website traffic. The higher, the better. Webmaster Tools gives you a short error report of your site - that's important to eleminate errors.
	Find competitive keywords This is an advanced tip. As you may know there are keywords out there, that are more valueable than others for more website traffic. Let me explain it with a real world example. 9.000 people a day do a search for "helicopter". A Google search for "helicopter" shows 39,500,000 hits. On the other side 3.000 people do a search for "rc helicopter". A Google search for "rc helicopter" shows us only 1,120,000 results. Guess which keyword is better to promote? "rc helicopter". The ratio between searches and available sites is much better with "rc helicopter", the chance for a good listing and more website traffic with this keyword is higher. There a lot of keywords out there with a much better ratio between searches and sites resulting in high website traffic. The unique web service that can provide this competitive data is called Wordtracker. They have access to the seach data of the search engines (they pay money for it) and compare it to the results of the search engines. A one week subscription is US$30. It's definitively worth the money, you only need one week to track the database, if you want to increase your website traffic in your niche. There is a free trial available. You'll love this service. When you found some competitive keywords make a single page or a set of pages around every keyword, for example "rc helicopter reviews", "rc helicopter prices", "rc helicopter links", etc. This sub-paging will increase website traffic.
	Buy Website Traffic This is an advanced tip to increase website traffic. Buy Text link ads. You found a very competitive keyword and wrote some pages about this keyword, but your site does not show in the Top 10 of this keyword at this point of time. No Website traffic? Then we recommend to talk to another webmaster with a well known site with the same topic and pay him some bucks to include a link (the anchor text must match to your chosen keyword , for example: '<a href="http://www.myhelicoptersite.com/rc-helicopter.html">rc helicopter</a>') to raise search engine positions and improve website traffic. Another possibility is to go to a service like , where you can find 1000's of niche sites that will add your site for a fixed price, for example US$20 or US$30 per month. If you click here then you'll get . The search engines will boost your link and you'll get more website traffic.

Analyze your Market

Simple Webdesign

Create Strong Content

Submit your Site

Build Networks

Be Communicative

Update your site

Monitor your site

Find competitive keywords

Buy Website Traffic