Writing Articles for Links and Traffic

Article directories are becoming more popular on the web. They provide great benefits such as to promote your site to online communities, who have potential to be interested with your web site's content and services. Article directories publish articles that are written by almost anybody. They serve as a free promotion tool for your web site or blog. Here are the few benefits of using article directories:

• Potential for wide range distribution (Backlinks): So, how article directories can help you to promote your site all over the web? Before answering this question, you need to know that, when you publish your article, you are agreeing for that article to be distributed. That means, people, who like your article can use it as a content in their web site or blog. But as part of the agreement, they need to credit the author or the directory by providing a link. Also if the article contains any link, these links has to be active in the publishers' web site. Depending on the quality of your article, it may be published on many web sites or blogs.
• Targeted visitors: Article directories, place your article in a specific categories. So, people, who read your article, are potential visitors to your site. For them to visit your site is entirely depending on the quality of the article. If they like it, they will come and visit your site for more.
• Increase Selling Power: When a visitor access to your site via article directories, this means that they liked your article and interested with your products or services.

As anybody can publish article, that does not mean every article that is published will be distributed over the web. The secret to a good article is writing good and unique content that is free from spelling and grammar mistakes. Always take your time when you are writing articles. Get someone else to proof read. After, you finish your article here are some directories for you to publish your article. Good Luck.

www.elib.org/articles/ www.articlecity.com www.ezinearticles.com

Generating Your Own RSS Sitemap

In my previous post, I provided some basic information about RSS and sitemaps. I talked about the benefits to have RSS feeds so the visitors can easily subscribe to those feeds to get instant updates about your site. Having a sitemap can help search engines a lot to understand the content and the structure of you website.

RSS feeds are written in XML, so if the user does not have the knowledge of the XML, it can be a challenging task to create RSS feeds. Here is a tool that will generate a RSS sitemap automatically for you. Simply put your URL and press the Generate Sitemap button. It will create the XML code for your site. So that simple.

ROR Sitemap Generator

I hope this helped you. This blog updates regularly. So if you want to keep up, you can link to us or subscribe to our RSS feed (black button bellow).

Promote Your Site With RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a syndication format that delivers your new updates in the form of headlines to people, who subscribe to your RSS. One of the main advantages of RSS is; people don't have to visit your web site to find out about the new contents.

How RSS Works?

To be able to use the advantages of the RSS, your web site has to have it's own RSS Feed. The RSS feed of a web site looks like http://getfreewebtraffictoyoursite.blogspot.com/rss.xml. Most of the blogs come with this URL. If you check the link above, you will see the content is written in XML. So, to be able to read this content you need a RSS reader. Simply, you put you feed in the reader, and reader makes the page readable by humans.

As long as you have your web site's RSS feed, you can submit this feed to many web sites. Also you can create and place buttons on your site to make the subscription for your content easier for your visitors. So if your visitors like the content, they can easily subscribe and get notified with the fresh content.

Useful Links and more information about RSS:

More RSS information
Explains more about how RSS works
RSS Readers
RSS Submission

SEO Tips - Submit to Search Engines or Directories

Many web site owners relies on the web site traffic generated by the search engines. For this reason search engine submission is the first action they take. However, it may take very long for your site to get indexed by the search engines. Therefore you should also submit to directories, in fact (some of may disagree) you should only submit to directories and never submit to search engines.

Directories will help your site to get indexed in the search engines more quickly. This is because search engine follow the links. So if a site is already indexed in the search engines, and if you have a link in that site, it is likely for the search engines crawlers to follow this link to your site.

I will give you an example. When I first started this blog, I only submitted to Google and Yahoo. However, I submitted over 200 directories. After a while, I saw visitors coming from MSN and AltaVista. So this showed me that the directories, where I submitted my links, were already indexed by MSN and AltaVista. So they automatically picked my site and indexed it.

Submission to online directories will also help your PR (PageRank) as it creates a back link to your site. Also search engines follow these links within these directories to find your web site and index your site much quicker. There are a lot of free directories available to submit your site.

I should also mention submission methods. I personally prefer manual submissions by hand. But if you want to choose auto submitters, I can recommend WEBCEO. It is a software that have a lot of useful functionalities to optimize your web site.

You can still go ahead and submit to search engines. But don't border to go further than major ones. Instead spend more time in submitting to directories as it will help your site to get indexed more quickly.

Web Site Traffic - Keep Visitors coming Back To Your Site

You can get visitors to your site in various ways. It can be a free web site traffic that is generated through forums, or it can be through pay per click advertisements. Which ever way you get the visitors, you have to make them come back to visit your site. This is probably the most important and difficult part in web site traffic. If your visitors are coming back to your site, that means you are in business.

Visitors will only return to your site;

• if they like the content - If your content is good, visitors will come back and check your site again. Therefore, you need to think about your targeted visitors, when you create the content.

• if the content updated regularly - Think your web site as a TV drama. If you like it, you carry on watching it. But, if they play the same part over and over again, you will probably change the channel and watch something else. So, why should your visitors come back to your site, if it not updated regularly?

• if your site is easy to navigate - Make sure your visitors find what they looking for. If they get lost within your pages, they will leave your site without looking to their back. So, Provide search functionalities and sitemaps. Always let them know where they are in your web site.

• if your content is original - Well you are probably asking yourself, "How can I produce a unique content, if there are a lot of web sites have similar information". Answer to this is spend time on research and produce your own version.

• if you send regular newsletters - To be able to send newsletters, you need to collect your visitors email addresses. This is not an easy and quick process. But, the ones who subscribe to your newsletter are the ones, who are interested with your content.

• if you have RSS feed - RSS is a format for syndicating content. If you provide the options like the ones on the top right corner of this blog (My Yahoo, Add to Google, etc.), visitors can easily subscribe to RSS feeds of your site. They will be notified, whenever you update your site.

• if your site is maintained for good performance - Always check if your web site loads properly. If your web site does not function the way it suppose to, visitors will not return.

• if your site name is easy to remember - Choose names that are easy to remember. Also try to use catchy names, so it can stick on the visitors mind.

Web Site Traffic - How to increase web site traffic today

In the next few days, I will provide you with some information regarding to web site traffic. I will provide some methods and tips to drew more visitors to your site. Certainly these methods will not send you thousands of visitors, but it will certainly have some effect on your visitor statistics. Most importantly you will get more targeted web site traffic. These methods are the ones I use to drew traffic to this blog along with others that I will explain in coming days.

To get quality traffic to your site you need to avoid programs that offers guaranteed web site traffic. These kind of sites send visitors, who are not interested with your content and services. They are usually called manual traffic exchange or auto surf programs. Manual traffic exchange or auto surf programs allow your web site to get viewed by others for only few seconds and re-direct the visitors to other sites. The visitors from auto surf programs have only one purpose to view your site. It is to gain credit for their web sites exposure. So manual traffic exchange programs only sends quantity not quality at all.

This is what you can actually do today to get more targeted web site traffic. Join to online communities such as forums and groups. Choose the ones that discusses the topics related to your web site content. Ask questions or answer others' questions but always leave your URL as your signature. Some of them also has sections, where you can exchange links, or ask others to review your site. Below you can see some forums and groups that I usually use. I actually get good amount of traffic from these sites alone.

• Blogger Forum, Has section that allows you to show your blog to others.
• Geeks On Steroids, Forum about search engines, SEO, and more. Also have section to exchange links with other members.
• Web Master Talk, has section for web site reviews and link exchanges.
• Site Point, discusses search engines, SEO, and many other useful topics.
• SEO Forum, Link exchange, Internet marketing, and directories.
• SEO Chat Forum, search engine optimization specific topics.
• Highrankings.com, search engine positioning, seo, web site review.
• Google Community, more about google products and services. But good forum.
• Dev Shed, more about programming, but have section, where you can discuss about anything.
• Dev Articles, similar to dev shed.
• Digital Point, have section to sell or buy trades. Also provides link exchanges.

So it is enough for today. You feel free to go and register to above forums. As I mentioned above, you won't get a lot of visitors, however, you should always be after quality traffic. Always avoid manual traffic exchange or auto surf programs.

Daily SEO Tips - Bidding for the Right Keyword

Selecting the keywords for your site is time consuming task. Well, you have to concentrate a lot on keywords, because they are the ones that help your site to climb the rankings of the search engines along with the back links. But, how should we choose the keywords? One way of doing this; find a site similar to yours that has a good page rank. View the source code and copy the keywords. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Bidding for the same keywords as high ranking sites is completely wrong strategy. That would not get you anywhere near the first few pages of the major search engines.

You have to do some research, when you are choosing the keywords. Find out, what keywords describe your web site well, what keywords are original to your web site. Let me give you an example: "job search" is a popular keyword. There has been 11,719,478 searches according to Keyword Discovery. However, "job search site" has 44,085 searches according to same tool. This means that by bidding for job search keyword, you have less chance to be found in the search engines. On the other hand job search site appears to be less popular keyword and more chance to be found by the search engines.

Above example doesn't mean to stick job search site all over your web page. What it means, grab yourself a keyword tool such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, and start researching on the keywords for your site. Bid for the keywords that has less searches and describes your site.

Daily SEO Tips - Keyword Selection Tools

Keyword selection is really important, when it comes to search engine optimization. To be able to get high position in search engines, you need to choose the right keywords. In my opinion, keyword selection should be the first task to do, before putting the content to your web site. Make sure the keywords you chose, describes your web site content. This is important because, search engines pick those words for positioning.

You can use keyword selection tools that helps you to analyze and find most appropriate keywords for your site. These tools gets statistics from major search engines, and provides information like, how many times that specific keyword is used on search engines to find something. Also it suggest similar keywords to be used on your site. There are a number of useful keyword research tools available on the web. The most recommended and user-friendly are Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. Both offer trial versions, but if you can try to get the full versions as it give more analytical information.