Improving Website Traffic

1. Have a Webmaster Account at Google with which you can manage your site(s).

To create an account with Google, go here Google Webmaster Tools. Once you have an account you can begin adding your sites. When adding your site Google will want to know if you have a sitemap.

2. Create an XML sitemap you can submit to Google. Well, you don't actually submit the XML Sitemap to Google, you simply tell Google where to find it on your site. First, you must create it.

Please understand that an XML Sitemap created for search engines is nothing like the HTML Sitemap you create for your site visitors. In fact, the first twenty lines of code would look something like this:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< urlset
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">

< url>
< loc>http://www.homebusinessop.com/
< priority>1.00
< lastmod>2008-11-12
< changefreq>weekly
< /url>
< url>
< loc>http://www.homebusinessop.com/tophomebusinesses.html
< priority>0.80
< lastmod>2008-11-12
< changefreq>weekly
< /url>

Note: I added a space after the initial < to make it appear on this page. In reality, there should be no space there.

Yes, it's a lot of work to create an XML sitemap. And, it's a lot of work to change it every time you update your pages. That's why most of us prefer to use a sitemap tool that will search our sites and create the XML version for us. It will save you a ton of time that you can use to perform other productive tasks.

Personally, I like the tool at XML Sitemaps.

3. List your site with Yahoo at Yahoo Site Explorer. You will need a Yahoo ID and you must register to use this feature. If you have an RSS feed, you can add it as well.

4. Keep going. Do the same thing at Windows Live Search (MSN).

5. One more major registration: Do it at DMOZ. DMOZ is actually a human-edited directory, but many smaller search engines draw information from DMOZ so you should do it.

This one month glimpse from Google Analytics shows 80.8% of visitors coming from search engines and that 94.65% of the total visitors during that month were first timers.

These strategies work!

DMOZ was mentioned in that last module about search engine submission. Now we're going to explore the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other web directories. You're tired already, aren't you?

There are certain web directories you should look at first. Find those that allow deep links. A deep link is a link to any page on your site other than your home page. The better web directories allow have an articles section where you can submit articles about your site or your site content and include links in your article. Affiliate links are not usually allowed, but that would defeat the purpose of using the web directory. You're doing this to get links to your site.

Most good web directories require a reciprocal link. Avoid those that want the link on your home page. And, after all, turn-about is fair play. They are providing you with a free, anchor text link to help your site. The least you could do is link back to the web directory.

Plan ahead. You should write a 250 character (including spaces) description of the page link you are submitting and a 500 character (including spaces) description. At least do the 250 character description.

Choose the right directory category for your site. If you try to add your site to a directory that is not appropriate for your site content, you will probably not be added.

Here's a web directory that allows both deep links and articles and all that is required is a reciprocal link: Reciprocal Links Directory

This process can be automated as well. Directory Maximizer is a submission service you can test for as little as $5.00.

Article sharing, to the best of my knowledge, is a term being invented as I type. The basis is quite a simple one. Rather than I'll show you mine if you show me yours, we make one little change. I'll show yours if you show mine.

The foundation of a website is content. The more content, the stronger the foundation. Why not add a section to your website called Articles of Interest? You could simply link to that section from your sitemap with no need to include it in your page navigation.

Exchange articles with other webmasters. They simply place your article on their website and, in return, you place an article written by them on yours.

The articles, of course, should be well written and optimized for a particular keyword or keyword phrase and include an anchor text link to a page on your site. The purpose is not to get traffic from the other website; the purpose is to gain an important keyword link to your website. Squidoo is a great place to find webmasters you want to share articles.

Post a message in the forum. You can also go to the Warrior's Forum and look for people. Article sharing - do it.

How to Generate Free Web Traffic is a new eBook released in 2009 that contains a lot of step-by-step how-to instructions and even includes screen shots that help you develop an overall strategy for generating free traffic for your website. It also includes lists of web directories that allow deep linking... and more!

At $18, it's a bargain for anyone interested in generating more traffic to their web sites. Find out more below:

How to Generate Free Web Traffic

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