| With the thousands of websites now on the Internet, it is not difficult to imagine why traffic is such an important issue for online marketing experts. Website traffic, at its simplest, means that people go regularly to your site ? and by this, we mean unique, human, living and breathing visitors, not just search engine robots (which, of course, count for visitors on many tallies). Another dimension of traffic includes the duration of stay of visitors on a site. Some people will stay on a site for a few seconds, then click away from it because it is not attractive or useful enough, or even because it is difficult to navigate or confusing to look at. Other people will stay on a site for hours, and for many different reasons: a site?s contents can be extremely useful, its navigation can be intuitive and easy to decipher, and the site itself is friendly to visitors and entertaining or engaging to readers. In order to make your site all these, and to drive traffic to your website, you will need to employ many different methods, both site and traffic wise. First of all, you need to know the power of the two major bigwigs that ensure Internet surfing ease today: the taggers and the search engines. Taggers are actual humans: they are your average Internet users who access digg and stumbleupon, who look at social networks, and who are immersed well enough in the universe of the Internet so that they know the likes, dislikes, whims, desires, and quirks of the members of the web world. In order to prosper online, you need to catch the attention of these taggers. First of all, start making yourself visible in social tagging networks. Digg and stumbleupon are only the two major players; try to network as well in larger places such as FaceBook, MySpace, Multiply, or Friendster, or anywhere where people congregate and exchange ideas and links. When fashioning your profile in these networks, always include the URL of your website, and maintain a simple blog that either links to your main blog, or has useful articles that will make people go to your main URL. The other major players are the search engines. Search engines index your site under certain keywords or key phrases, and through the help of crawling and indexing software called spiders or robots. Such software will pick up keywords and key phrases from the text content of your site, and will place your site under the listings for these keywords and key phrases if the keywords and key phrases appear at a certain density. When users search for these keywords and key phrases in the search engine, then your site will appear at a certain ranking, depending on your popularity. Take note of the fact that it is your site text content that is considered when determining your indexing status, not your graphics. Search engines crawl only through text, so you may want to put your important information in text, not graphics, such as animation or videos. If you have important animation or videos, then places descriptions for such files so that the search engines can still recognize the presence of such multimedia. You also need to take note that not all your users will be patient enough to wait for large graphics and multimedia files to download, so you may want to take advantage of text and place all important information on immediately. There are also advertisement networks that you can join in order to make your site more visible, but you need to take care of your website first to ensure that traffic is directed again and again onto your online home. |