Boost Traffic Checklist

If you don't have a blog, get one

Even if blogging is not at the center of your web activity, add a blog to your e-commerce or e-community site and start posting. The search engines will love the dynamic, constantly changing content, and so will your visitors. Use the other blog tips here to write great posts. Be sure to ping Technorati every time you update your blog.

Write more content

If you want traffic, you've got to write content. And it's got to be good content. People will not visit your site if you don't provide a decent amount of good quality content, and new visitors definitely won't come back.

Use RSS and other feeds

The modern web thrives on RSS (really simple syndication). When people subscribe to you via RSS, Atom, or get your blog updates in email, they'll see your posts whenever you make a new one. This is vital for keeping people in touch with your blog and getting them to come back.

Write a pillar post

If blogging is your game, write a pillar post. This post is a long, authoritative, instructional post. Pillar posts should take a long time, hours, to write. You should link to your pillar posts often in your blog, and make sure they get top exposure. Pillar posts will get linked to and receive decent amounts of traffic.

Write link love posts

I try to write link love posts every couple of weeks where it is just one big post linking to articles in the blogosphere or on the web that I like, mostly ones related to my niche. Not only does this get you trackbacks, but it also gives you the higher chance of getting linked to in return, which then means traffic.

Write reviews

If you write a really good honest review of a new product or brand, it could get a lot of attention from people who are interested in purchasing the product.

Establish and build relationships

Develop relationships with all kinds of bloggers, site owners, Internet geeks, customers, and everyone else, especially those in your niche. Comment on their blogs, have conversations, link to them, make friendships. And before you know it, they'll be linking to you and sending traffic your way.

Join forums and message boards

Join forums and message boards related to niche. If it is permitted, link to your site or blog when/where you can. Other people on the forum are very likely to check out your site.

Make a Myspace and get friends

Make a Myspace or Facebook (or both) and work on getting a lot of friends. This doesn't mean adding the bands or celebrities that automatically accept you. This means the real people. Just go around adding people. Go to 'Browse' and add people. Once you have hundreds of friends, link to your site or blog in bulletins and on your profile and everywhere you can. It could draw in some traffic if you do it correctly.

Offer to write material for others

Offer to write a post on someone else's blog site. Even better, have the post already written up and then let the blogger know you have a post ready for their site, if it's okay with them. When you write your guest blog post, find a post on your own blog that's related and link to it in your guest blog post. That's a link for you on their blog, and more traffic.

Start using Stumbleupon

I have had a HUGE success with StumbleUpon. When the right article from your blog meets StumbleUpon, expect a lot of people to rate your post a thumbs up, and then even more people 'stumbling upon' your blog.

Use Youtube

Make an account on Youtube, and then on your profile you can list your website address. List your site or blog's link there. Then start making videos and when people view your profile, some of them might click through to your website! You can also embed Youtube HTML code directly into your site.

Use Squidoo

Squidoo is a cool web site with a large collection of user-generated web pages and, just as important, a large and active community of accomplished web enthusiasts. Use the site to create web pages (Squidoo calls them lenses) about your niche, and put links on your lens back to your blog or web page.

Answer questions with follow-on content

If someone comments or emails you with a question, and you could give them a very long, drawn out answer, write a blog post instead. You won't be wasting your time and then to answer that person, just give them a link to the new post you've written!

Signup on Yahoo! Answers

On Yahoo! Answers you are able to answer other people's questions, help them, and give answers. There is a box where you can write the source of where you got your answer. Answer questions in your field and link to your blog posts as the source!

Ask your visitors questions

Visitors like to feel important and a lot of them like to talk. The next time you post to your blog, ask them a question or their opinion on something. You'll receive a lot more comments and feedbacd, and many of the visitors will be more likely to come back.

Plug into social bookmarking

On many web pages you will see a line of buttons that lets people submit and vote my content to social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, Netscape, and others included). I'm using the AntiSocial plugin. If you have this plugin implemented you are WAY more likely to be submitted to social bookmarking sites, which in turn means a lot more traffic.

Use MyBlogLog

If you are a blogger, make sure you have an eye-catching avatar. Then join all the MyBlogLog communities you can (daily limit of 15). In no time your avatar will be all over all the MyBlogLog blog and community pages, and you'll see more and more visitors coming to you.

Encourage others to Digg your articles

Digg is a site that lets people vote on articles, on whether people like them or not. Your blogger friends will most likely Digg your work for you if you politely ask, or even better, add a Digg button at the bottom of all your posts. Make sure your best articles get Dugg and started in the right direction, and if the post is good enough, it can generate thousands of visitors a day.

Add link(s) to your signature

If permitted, add your site or blog's link to your forum signature and get active in the community. The link will show up under all of your posts. You can get a nice little amount of traffic if the forum has a lot of members.

Write catchy titles with keywords

First of all, pages with catchy titles receive more traffic than those with bland, unoriginal titles. Secondly, add some keywords to your catchy titles! You will get ranked better in the search engines. Also, when people link to your site with its keywords, you'll get ranked even better, with even more traffic from Google, Yahoo, etc.

Make your readers feel at home

If you are rude, never give back, don't answer your comments or emails, don't help other site owners or bloggers, or are always uptight and don't make your readers feel at home, chances are they might stop visiting your blog. When you make your readers feel at home, you get more traffic.

Be human, not a robot

If in all your writing you sound extremely business-like, never mention yourself, only talk about the same thing all the time, or are 100% perfect, it could actually send people away. I'm not telling you to be sloppy, talk about yourself all the time, stray from your topic, or make a lot of mistakes. But let your readers know you're like them too and that you have some things in common. Don't make your site be boring.

Be a comedian

Make people laugh. For a lot of you out there, this shouldn't be hard. When you make people laugh they will feel a connection to your site or blog and want to tell others and come back.

Be yourself

The Internet is a great place to be anonymous, but if you are, no one will feel a connection to you and want to keep visiting your blog. Just be yourself, don't pretend to be someone you're not, and people will love you for it. I promise.

Use both traditional and emerging marketing strategies

Both traditional and emerging marketing strategies work well to increase your traffic, but emerging strategies harness the power of the Internet to produce significant results. Amazon.com, for instance, has perfected the art of adaptive cross-selling, e.g., 'people who bought that product liked this product as well.

Buy ads using Google Adwords

Sign up for Google Adwords and buy advertising. People will click on ads and get to your site. Some could become loyal readers but many will not. A good way of getting traffic, but there are several things you will have to learn from experience, including keyword selection and cost-per-click bid levels. Google supplies tools for learning these, but perseverance pays off. Don't give up early.

Have a contest or giveaway

Hold a contest or a giveaway for a very awesome prize, and people will flock to your site in hopes of winning it. If you give away something really cool, the news will spread like wildfire. Beforehand though, make sure your blog is already receiving a fairly decent amount of traffic with some loyal readers.

Conduct polls

People like voting in polls and like seeing what the outcome of a poll was. Polls are popular, and popular means traffic. If you're using Wordpress, get the Wordpress polls plugin.

Start an awards series

Spend some time making a little trophy or banner for an award. Make sure your award has a theme and a name, for example, 'The Kind Blogger Award'. Then link to five kind bloggers. In the rules, get each of them to link and pass the award to five more bloggers that they think are kind. Many will link back to you as the creator of this award series and you will receive traffic for it.

No immediate gratification

It takes time and diligence to build high volume traffic to your web site. The search engines know how long you have been around, and factor this into your page ranking. For most sites, figure one year before anything major starts happening. Diligence comes in two forms: (1) diligence to do proper planning, development, and maintenance of your site, and (2) diligence to continually update your site with fresh, up-to-date, material specific to your niche.

Provide fresh, relevant, specific content

Search engines recognize old content. They are always looking for something fresh and specific to topics that people are searching for. If your content is old and static, your page ranking on the search engines will go down. Don't let this happen.

Monitor your page ranking continuously

High page ranking is the key to free traffic from search engines. Use the free page rank checkers to monitor your progress. You want your page ranks to go up, not down.

Find the latest new and promote them on your site

Search engines are always looking for up-to-date content. Scour the web news services to find the latest and greatest information in your niche, and promote this information on your site.

Check the search engines often

Google, especially, changes their spider and page ranking criteria often. They are continually adding new features. Check their webmaster help pages often to be sure you are doing things that are synchronized with their latest algorithms. Take their advice. It is good advice.

Submit to search engines

Most people get the majority of their traffic from search engines. When people search for your keyword and find your site or blog, there's more traffic! Be sure to submit your site to be indexed in Google if it hasn't been already, and remember to keep writing fresh content for the engines to chew on! Don't forget Yahoo! and MSN in addition to Google.

Don't submit too often

If you submit to a search engine over and over again, your site will be blocked. Once per month is enough and, when you know your site is already indexed, stop submitting.

Create and submit a sitemap

Unless your site is one page, create a sitemap for your site and submit it to search engines. This allows spiders to crawl your site efficiently and makes sure the spider sees all your content. Most site builders automatically create sitemaps for you, or you can create one yourself. Just be sure you have one.

Submit to site directories

Some directories list hundreds of sites, some list thousands. The backlinks are great, but the traffic from the directories will be less than a trickle, most likely nothing. However, submit with your site's name using your keywords, and then you could be ranked more highly on Google for those keywords, which means more traffic!

Submit to article directories

This is a great way to promote your site. eZineArticles.com is a good article directory, and there are many others.

Use keyword tools to design your keywords

There are several good, free keyword tools, including WordTracker and Good Keywords. Design your keywords early. If you try to insert new keywords in old content, it gets messy.

Sprinkle keyword throughout your content

Figure out what tags and keywords you will be using and sprinkle them throughout your website pages and blog posts. Shoot for a keyword density of 3 to 6 percent. Too little and you'll get poor page ranking, too much and you'll be blocked due to keyword spamming.

Exchange links with others

Whether the link exchange is on a sidebar on every page of the site, on one page of the site, or in a post on the site, it's up to you. But link exchanging with others who have related sites can be a big help. And when their sites grow, an even bigger help!

Link to other posts

When you link to posts on other sites, that creates a trackback, or pingback. When you link to a blogger's post, if they have trackbacks turned on, you will receive a link back as well in the comments section of the post of which you linked.

Link to your own posts

When you link to posts on other sites, that creates a trackback, or pingback. When you link to a blogger's post, if they have trackbacks turned on, you will receive a link back as well in the comments section of the post of which you linked.

Post comments to high-ranking blogs

One great way to get backlinks is to place meaningful, legitimate comments on blog posts in your niche. The search engines find these backlinks and the more you have, the higher your ranking. This is good.

Start your own directory

This is something I tried once but failed at miserably. However, I'm sure if I tried again I could do it right, and you could too! When you make your directory at first, make all the links completely free and just have a link submit form where the submissions are emailed to you. You can do a weekly/daily roundup of all the links sent to you, or you can assign the links to their proper categories. When your site gets even bigger, you can ask for a reciprocal link. Then have a 'featured site' table, and link to your main website in it.

Ask the bigger sites for a link

You've got to do this right or not at all. You need to be polite and not beg. Start building your conversation with the A-lister and developing the relationship before you ask for anything. Make sure you give to them, link to them in your posts. Before you do anything, Use Technorati tags. Getting into more categories in Technorati will get you a lot more exposure, which means more traffic.

Add links to the bigger sites

The more you link to the A-listers in your niche, the more they will probably notice you. Then they might link to one of your pages as well, which could send huge amounts of traffic your way!

Do something unique

Build a brand and do something original that no one else has done. You will receive a lot of links and traffic for it and the name will stick around for a long time, if not forever. Come up with a new concept that no one else has done before.

Write a pillar post

If blogging is your game, write a pillar post. This post is a long, authoritative, instructional post. Pillar posts should take a long time, hours, to write. You should link to your pillar posts often in your blog, and make sure they get top exposure. Pillar posts will get linked to and receive decent amounts of traffic.

Discuss the big guns

For me this would be people like Darren Rowse and John Chow, the really big bloggers. You can write about them as a person or a blogger or you can write about how they're running and doing things. You can post your thoughts on something they've said or extend on one of their posts and then leave a comment saying you've done so.

Share one of your secrets

Whether it be a huge secret about your success or a personal secret about your life, nobody can resist.

Get your own domain

If you have your domain, you will get more traffic. You will linked to more and people will more easily remember your URL. Try to get your own domain and have it from the start.

Check out the source code for high-ranking sites

Use the view source feature of most browsers to see how a high-ranking page is constructed from the inside out. Copy this structure for your own pages.

Make graphics for social networks

People who use Myspace, Facebook, and all those e-community sites love using graphics. Colorful banners. Animated, blinking images. If you can make awesome things like that, then they'll use it. It's worth a shot for some traffic and links.

Make graphics that are useful to others

If you make some free graphics people can use on their website or blog, you'll get more traffic from this as well, and it's not nearly as hard. If you're a professional at making graphics, even try charging a little bit to get money on top of it.

Tag your images

When you have an image in your post, it should always be tagged properly. Make sure the width and height are clearly defined. But most importantly, fill out the alt and title tags with the image's keywords.

Code it yourself for complete immersion

If you want absolute control over every aspect of your web site, or if you really want to know what's going on under the hood, code your own web software and maintain it yourself. Straight HTML is fine for static text and images, but if you want dynamic content and server-side databases, then PHP and MySQL or Perl are probably the best. Use PHP or JavaScript for those fancy dynamic menus and such. Be prepared for plenty of frustration, however. The web is a moving target, and it is hard to hit a moving target!

Use TextPattern for your blog page

Reviews on the web have compared the TextPattern CMS with others and found it to be more spam resistant. You want more traffic, but you sure don't want spam. Like most CMSs, TextPattern is more than a software tool; it is a way of life. The learning curve is a little steep. You must know HTML and CSS to use TextPattern effectively.

Take the ads off your site

To increase your traffic remove your ads. When you have no way of making money on your website, you seem a lot more serious and devoted. Most likely you will get more traffic and loyal readers. And then maybe in the future, you can ad the ads again to start making some money.

Avoid crazy 'money earner' schemes

Don't waste your time with crazy 'money earners' such as those that pay you to click, pay you to read, pay you to surf, pay you to search, or anything like that. Those aren't worth anything. Instead, spend your time writing quality content and the traffic will follow.

Don't rely on meta tags for SEO

Five years ago meta tags were important, but this is not the case today. Search engine spiders crawl all the content in your web site to find out what is going on there and, if it is relevant, index your content to the search engine database.

Don't use link trains

Don't use link trains. This does not directly relate to traffic but it's still good advice. I made the mistake of joining in on the ViraLink and ViralTags, and you should never do that! Besides, your readers will appreciate it and they'll stick around longer.