I get this question all the time… How do I generate traffic for my websites?

The hardest part about creating a successful website is getting the traffic. If you don’t have traffic you won’t make any sales. Don’t worry though; it’s your lucky day! I just drank a whole cup of coffee and I’m ready to write a guide on how I generate traffic for my websites.

If you’ve read any of my older post you would know I run 50 plus websites with my latest being an IP tracking website called IP Burger. Most of these websites are content based running off wordpress and automated software – which takes a lot of the hard work out of maintaining my websites. It also gives me time to build up my network with off site SEO.

Okay to the meat! How do I generate traffic? The two most import things you should know about generating search engine traffic is that the more targeted unique content you add to your website daily and the more relative high ranking in bound links you have pointing to your website – the more traffic you’ll create.

Content and the value of that content determines your traffic. You can’t just have any old content on your website. Your content has to give real value to the visitor. You have to have something that people will want to know. If you repost something already found on the internet, Google will notice and give you crap for ranking. It’s not worth your time and effort using other people’s content. You have to use unique content and you have to add or update that content often for Google to keep your website up in the ranks.

What I mean by this is Google will continue to visit your website if there is content updated or added often. The more you add or update your content, the more Google will visit your website. And you want Google to visit your website as often as possible! The reason for this is the more Google visits your website the higher your search engine placement will be compared to less visited websites. Do you get me? Another way Google will visit your website often is in bound linkage. The more in bound links you have, the more Google will visit your website and update your web presence.

So the key is to add fresh and relevant content to your website as often as you can without spamming the search engines, and to have plenty of in bound links. The way you get in bound links is by posting your links in forums, blogs, articles, or anywhere else you can have you link counted. The higher ranking the website your link is coming from, the more weight Google places on your website for targeted keywords. This will also give you a small boost in your search engine ranking which will increase traffic.

Think about adding content this way. Every new page you create on your website is like adding a new doorway into your site. The more doorways you create, the more traffic you’ll receive. And again your content needs to be relevant and unique to your business in order to generate targeted traffic.

Keywords!

What are keywords? Keywords are words you’re trying to rank #1 for in Google. If the keyword you’re trying to rank for is blue widget, then any in bound links you create should have a variation of that keyword in it.

Example Keywords: Blue widgets for sale, cheap blue widgets, blue widgets information, your guide to blue widgets, etc.

Google relies on these keywords to decide what your website is about; which brings me to your webpage titles. Your webpage titles should include keywords you’re trying to target. Google will look at your in bound links for keywords, but will only act on them if these keywords are found either in your content or title.

Example: Google ‘Miserable Failure‘.

A few months ago, when you looked up this keyword in Google, the first site that would be listed would be about George W. Bush. Now Bush never used the words Miserable Failure in his website, but because of the way Google was ranking keywords at the time, he was listed in first position for that word. But now since Google has made it clear that keywords must be found in your website before being counted toward your search engine ranking, the first site ranked for Miserable Failure is a wiki site about Google Keyword Bombing. Search engine optimization is funny stuff.

Enough with keywords –

Let’s move on to crawlability. Search engine spiders scour the internet to update as many websites as fast as they can. In order to maximize the ability for a search engine spider to crawl all your web pages, you’ll need URLs that are search engine friendly. Most search engines are able to crawl some parts of dynamic URLS, but this won’t be enough if you want high rankings for your website. You need URLS that end in PHP, HTML, ASP, ASPX, etc. You need static URLS. Trust me on this!

Some more about the type of content you have –

The Experiment!

Okay this is what I did a few days ago to double my traffic for one of the websites I run. The website is a content based site where user rate guides submitted. What I was doing to generate around 1000 visitors a day was to simply add new guides daily which would be displayed on the index page. It’s somewhat a Digg style website. This worked okay, but I was having a hard time increasing traffic. So then one day, I noticed users responded negatively or positive based on the content posted. If there was a great guide posted one day, I would see an increase of traffic. It seemed visitors reacted to the guides differently depending on it’s quality or it was the search engines. So I tested something a few days ago. I made it where the top rated guides would be shown on the front page. The moment I did this, I saw a surge in traffic! Twice as much as the day before! Why does better content have such a big response like this? I’m not really sure. Most of the traffic is unique and coming from one place. Google. Google seems to love the good content I have.

This tells me the better your content is, the more people will react to this and give you traffic. Same with search engines, the better content you have, the more traffic you’ll receive.

Just something interesting I found. Content is king, but the value of that content is what really matters.

The overall message I’m trying to give you is in order to increase your natural search engine traffic for the long run is to have tons of valuable content and in bound links. It’s as simple as that.

You can create a forum, which this site has (eBay Suspensions Forum) and have your users generate the content for you. You can have a blog which is what this site is founded on, and update it daily (which I don’t). You can create a simple static website and build pages from there. There are a lot of little secrets when it comes to SEO, but building content and in bound links is the basis for a successful website.

I hope you enjoyed these little tips, now get to work. 🙂