In my last article, “Discover The Easy Way of Building Link Directories” I told you about how search engine optimized directory pages can attract more traffic to your website, when people search for those related products or services that you have listed on those directory pages. I also told you that by maintaining well laid-out and organized directory pages, you could get reciprocal links from those websites. Or, in other words, you can get more inbound links to your website.

Link Popularity Means High Page Ranks!

Let’s face it - the greater the number of links pointing to your website, the higher is your page rank with most search engines! Google, AltaVista, HotBot - they all use the number of inbound links parameter as a very important factor in determining your page rank. As such, link popularity still plays a vital role in getting those top ranks and search engine positions for your websites.

Moreover, if those links are coming from high quality, related websites, then there’s nothing better than that! Search engines will love your site if all your links - both inbound and outbound - are completely relevant to the content of your web pages! And if your inbound links come from pages having a high ranking, then that automatically increases your page rank too! If such high-ranking pages consider your site worthwhile enough for linking to it, then your site must be offering some really good content!

The Catch

The only catch here is that acquiring a decent number of legitimate inbound links, from good-quality, related websites, requires a considerable amount of ingenuity and expertise. You don’t want to irritate the search engines by accumulating generic links, so that they throw you off their grid completely! Neither do you want to end up linking to a banned website!

As we discussed in the previous email, accomplishing this task can consume a lot of energy and leave you tired, even more so when you have to maintain more than one website! Besides, there is always the time factor that is essential for gaining the upper hand over your competition.

Use Of SEO Software For Link Maintenance

Using a reputable SEO software program, for establishing and maintaining your link partnerships, can greatly ease the burden off your shoulders! It can accomplish within days what would manually take months to achieve! A good link maintenance program -

• keeps track of the locations you’ve already submitted your site to
• prevents being linked to banned websites and thus, keeps you out of trouble
• allows you to manage information about all the sites connected from your website
• generates highly targeted directory pages automatically, based on the information specified for your outgoing links
• automatically uploads the link files to your web server
• customizes the structure of your link pages through automatic category creation and management
• has an internal link check feature, that easily and conveniently ascertains whether your link partners still have reciprocal links to your site or if they have been dropped
• effectively manages all your link email campaigns - handles all email tasks of contacting and managing prospective link partners, and also keeps them notified of any updates

Popularity: 90% [?]

In this article, I am going to talk about a social networking site that is loaded with rich prospects. Not yet as popular as MySpace or Facebook, Gather.com is a social networking site that is any Internet marketer’s dream. In its own words Gather is a ‘place where informed, engaged people share perspectives on everything” Consider the following about Gather.com

• At least 75% of the members have a college education
• A majority of the members fall within the 30-60 age group
• More than 80% of the site members enjoy a $50000 annual household income
• These members enjoy spending

These well placed citizens on Gather.com would constitute quality traffic. Can you ignore it? Of course you can’t. So your first step is to visit gather.com and register for a free account.

After signing up, you can head to ‘My Gather’ and create your member profile. You can then post an article or comment. You can also browse around, read other people’s articles, and share images. You can join groups that appeal to you and also invite other friends or associates to join.

Since your intention is to generate traffic, you must make your profile attractive by posting quality articles that are interesting to read. You must ensure that your headlines are catchy with relevant tags.

When you post your articles, you can also include links, images and lay them out to look pleasing so that you get a lot of highly targeted visitors who click the link to your website and can convert into customers.

Gather.com is a social networking site, and as such, you can promote yourself. You can network with members who are in your target market. Get your friends also to join gather.com and rate your posts - highly.

You can ask people to recommend your posts and share it with others by bookmarking it on del.icio.us or ‘digging it.’ If you have any free stuff to offer, mention this at the end of your article with a link. This can get you heavy traffic.

Commenting on other popular members’ articles particularly if they are in your niche can get you lots of highly traffic.

Gather.com is also a great place for pay per click advertising and paid ads. So cash in on this little known social networking site to attract these prosperous members to your website.

Like Gather.com, there are other social networking sites that can also be effective in getting you highly traffic. Social media marketing is here to stay. By using the web 2.0 websites and blogs wisely, there are a lot of benefits to be gained, apart from the obvious ones.

Popularity: 86% [?]

Link building takes time and effort but the long-term benefits are worth it. So how will you build link popularity for your site? That’s our focus for today.

In a previous article, “Why Should You Build Links?“, I talked about how important it is to build your site’s link value since it will increase your chances of getting linking requests and gradually get other sites to link to you, increasing your link popularity at the same time. There are certain things that you must bear in mind when you build link popularity:

• Go only for the relevant links. Quality scores over quantity any day and you need to ensure that the links pointing to your site are from web sites relevant to yours.
• List your website in all the major directories.
• Submit your website to the about.com site if it is relevant to a particular topic.
• Which sites link to your competitors? Find those and try getting them to link to yours.
• Make a list of links when you get in touch with related sites for linking.
• You can also try to get websites complementary to yours to link to you. if you sell dog food, then you might want to a website dealing in kennels to link to you.
• While visiting websites related to yours, if you comment on their guest books or participate in their forums, include your website URL in your signature.
• Write a testimonial for the website you want to link to you so that they can link to it on your website.
• Affiliate programs are a great way to build link popularity

Search engines prefer to see links that come naturally to your site and there are several ways to achieve link popularity, increase your search engine rankings and generate huge traffic to your site.

How Great Content Can Help With Link Popularity:

Just as search engines love natural inbound links, they also love quality content. This is a major factor that brings in natural back links. You can write keyword rich articles, publish them in high-ranking websites, and also submit them in article directories. By adding a resource box where there’s a link to your website, you can see a lot of traffic and inbound links.

Consider Blog Publishing

By starting a blog, you can post the kind of content you want your niche market to see. Unlike in article directories, you can also freely add links to your products or services where appropriate. Blogs can be submitted to blog and web directories enabling you build link popularity. In addition, RSS syndication will also make you more visible.

Posting In Forums:

These are search engine friendly places where you can sign up for free and provide useful content. Apart from the advantages of establishing yourself as an expert, you can also generate a lot of natural inbound links to your site through your signature file on the forum.

Obviously, there are plenty of other ways to build links to your site. High page ranking by the search engines equals traffic equals better conversion rates and profits.

Popularity: 32% [?]

In my last article, “Discover The #1 Secret To Leverage Forums For Traffic“, I talked about forums and how you can leverage them for traffic through the content you post. Blogs can also be monetized through content. Blog marketing is a hot topic with internet marketers, so lets see how you too can get the best out of them.

Blogs are easy to start. Blogs are cheap Internet advertising strategies. You can start one for free on blogger.com, wordpress.com, etc. They are often a great alternative to building and maintaining a website. In fact, most Newbies in online business get started with a blog to get a feel of the whole thing and then plan bigger projects.

The success of blogs is mainly due to that thirst for information, which leads visitors to browse the Internet. Happily, the search engines also demand good quality content and since you need to rank high with the search engines so that they bring you focussed traffic, you can use blogs to achieve this.

Blogs are must-haves for Internet business success. Bloggers wield a lot of powerful influence because when someone is considering buying something, they prefer to turn to their favorite blogs for more information and product reviews and to express their concerns. People trust blogs and visit them regularly, especially when it is refreshed on a daily basis. See what we mean? Now lets move on to ways in which you can pull traffic using your blog.

• Your blog title and description must be keyword specific. When you sign up to start a blog, say at blogger.com, you are asked to give a title and a brief description. Here’s where you think hard. Based on who is your target audience and what topic you are passionate about writing on, you can do some quick keyword research with the help of a keyword research tool and name your blog.
• Generate keyword rich content for your blog. You want to be found by your niche market don’t you? Update your blog on a daily basis so that your visitors bookmark you and keep visiting to see what is new. While original posts are best, you can also use an automatically updating feed getting content from other blog posts and articles. With each post treated as its own page, to the search engines your blog will appear like a multi page website with regular fresh content that is rich in keywords and links.
• Your blog profile must be complete with information about yourself as a person. Visitors love to see that you are for real, what you like and dislike, your favorite things etc. Sprinkle in a few relevant keywords, too.
• While at it, you can also post on other blogs and link back to your blog. Make contact and start the process of relationship building. The more links you have to your blog, naturally the more traffic you will see.
• Allow people to subscribe to your blog through RSS feeds. The advantage is, your content will be delivered to your readers by their consent. Each time you post new content they are notified about it.
• Submit your blogs to RSS directories as a one time activity.
• Each time you update your blog, ping it to let the directories know.
• Preferably create an RSS reader of your own - it’s a good branding exercise for increased visibility.
• Consider pod casting. Technology changes by the day and you might like to keep up with it. There are pod casting services that can upload, store, host and set up the RSS and submit to directories as well as ping.
• Try video-blogging.

Blogs are probably the easiest way to be indexed by the search engines for your specific keywords, and are a great platform to launch your products, pre sell your products and keep in touch with your niche market.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Apart from the conventional tried and tested methods as an online marketer you must also keep track of new methods and concepts when it comes to traffic generation. And if it costs you nothing - even better. This brings us to Squidoo, the Web 2.0 program that’s being raved about by everyone who knows about it.

What sets Squidoo apart from similar sites is that it has quality content. Most of the pages on Squidoo, not surprisingly rank high with the search engines. The site itself is ranked seven on Google and in the Alexa rankings Squidoo is rated among the top thousand websites on the Internet.

On the Squidoo website you can set up your own ‘lens’ or web page on any topic that you are passionate about. You can leverage your lens by making a keyword rich Squidoo URL. Most forward-planning marketers create more than one lens for different topics using their primary keywords.

The keywords can also be used in the page title and scattered strategically through the content on the page. The concept of long tailed keywords, which are keywords that run to more than just 3-4 words, works effectively here, bringing in the focussed traffic that you want to grow your list and your profits.

Squidoo owes its success to the fact that its members are a dynamic community that is continuously coming up with excellent content and links. You can easily establish yourself as an expert in your area.

By optimizing your Squidoo lenses to the search engines through keywords, you will be accessing the entire Web 2.0 media tagging system. Your rankings will improve to a great extent if your links to your other sites and content are relevant.

Creating original content is the first step. It must be appealing to the visitors and the community. Since there’s community ranking, with quality content, you can be rated highly by the users. By browsing around the site, you get a good idea about how others are tapping into Squidoo and use the same methods to be successful yourself.

Squidoo tips on tags

When you make your lens pay close attention to ‘tags’. You will be asked to choose your primary keyword or tag along with three more. Don’t stop here. Add at least 25 - 30 more tags. Why do you need to do this? Tags attract the search engines. These tags, with no intervention from you, are coded into the html of your website - so imagine the result. Google just swallows it. So when users use Google to search for your tags, chances are good that your page will come up, or at the very least, the overall tag page on Squidoo. By adding the right tags to your Squidoo lens, you can maximize the chances of your being found.

The next thing about tags is this. When visitors search on Squidoo using the tags, the results are brought up based on the tags on all the pages and then by page rank. So if your site is about affiliate marketing, one of your tags must be ‘affiliate marketing’ for you to actually receive traffic on your site. Elementary.

Keep adding tags to your Squidoo lens via the edit tags option.

Now you can see how you can use Squidoo to generate traffic and back links to your website. If you are in affiliate marketing, you can display affiliate links.

Popularity: 17% [?]

It is a fact that when it comes to online success, content is indeed the king. Moreover, it can be leveraged in various ways through several media to get massive traffic to your website even as you build your lists.

Most online marketers are on a tight budget when it comes to advertising and the more creative ones are always on the lookout for practically no-cost ways to achieve their promotional goals. Forums are powerful places for generating traffic, because they are niche-related. People join forums to be associated with people with similar interests and needs, and to share views. Being user-run, it is genuine and as an online marketer, you can reap many advantages through forums. You can become a member for free. Of course, you must strictly abide by the rules of the forum, but it is that which makes the forum so attractive. Here is what you keep in mind:

• Identify the forums that relate to your niche and get an idea of how many members it has. You can read the message threads at most forums without becoming a member. Then, sign up with the ones that appear suitable.
• You can use a forum to establish yourself as a credible expert and to build a reputation of being trustworthy in your niche. Keep track of the messages and offer solutions to problems that you are familiar with. Forums are also the ideal places to write unbiased product reviews.
• It is important to post regularly to build trust and develop a strong relationship with the members.

Pay special attention to your forum signature

You can add a signature to your forum post. Create your signature in such a way that it inspires the reader to know more and visit your website. Preferably, include your keywords in the link.

What you want to keep track of here is to check whether the forum is “nofollow”. If it isn’t, then you can add relevant links to articles that you have on your blog or website in your forum posts. Obviously, these links must be to relevant stuff that is useful. Over time, this activity will help your own articles be indexed by Google, bringing you up in the search results.

If you are wondering how to test whether the forum is ‘nofollow’ - here is what you do. Browse back to the postings made in say, the last couple of months and identify a message that has a signature with a link to their web page. With Google’s page rank tool you can find the backward links to the forum user’s signature URL. Do you see the forum in the results? If you do, click it. Verify whether it is the same signature that has been indexed. If it has been indexed, aha! You have a forum where signatures are indexed. So your posts here will receive page rankings.

Another valuable tip here apart from growing your back links. Ensure that your title text and heading tags are identical to your URL. This enhances your page ranking and lets you get navigational queries.

Popularity: 26% [?]

In Internet marketing, even though you may not need a website right away, eventually you will have to build one as you grow. The website you build must not only be successful, but also search-engine friendly. We have put together the most vital points that you need to follow to achieve this goal.

Content

This is the most obvious, but sadly the most overlooked. Google and your visitors both love quality content. So make sure that you have plenty of it ready so that you keep refreshing it on your website. Stale content does not work. Google likes ranking a website that frequently has new information with the keywords that the prospective visitor is looking for.

A Website With A Simple Design

There’s a misconception that graphic and html rich websites are best. But that’s not true. A simple professional website that has more text than html is always best. Too many complex components like JavaScript, flash elements etc. can be quite annoying as they take time to load. Can you imagine someone with low bandwidth smiling over this? Also, your website must be viewable no matter which browser is being used by the user.

Smaller Pages That Load Quickly

Size matters - and this time it is small that matters. Your website must load quickly. No one has the time to wait around.

How Much Content

Lots of it. Try and add at least one page per day - a length of 300 to 600 words should be fine. Use your keywords. And don’t forget to use the spell check. Here’s a tip - on your blog, rather than make journal like entries, go for short keyword rich articles.

Keywords

You have short listed keywords relevant to your business. Use them especially in your title and description tag, page subtitles, your URL, on your page in bold, italic and in your content summary at the beginning.

Linking

Within your website, have links between relevant pages. It would be even better if you use your keywords in these links. Link your high-ranking pages with those of other sites. Ensure that the content is complementary.

Site Submission

This is an important activity - you must submit your website to Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, etc. and other search engines and directories. Keep track and resubmit if you don’t appear on their list in 3-4 months.

Monitoring

Keep track of where your focussed traffic is coming from and which methods for attracting traffic are working successfully.

Anticipate

If you plan to introduce something big, now’s the time to build a web page. Why? Search engines need time to index the page and show it to your prospective customers.

Words, Words

Your visitors want content. Write for them. Research for what they are looking for. Your chances of becoming a top ranking website is greatly enhanced when you add fresh content every day.

Popularity: 33% [?]

You know that affiliate marketing thrives on links and the more the number of relevant links to and from your website, the better your search engine ranking and focused traffic. What follows is a list of practical, simple, ready-to-use methods that are highly effective. Ready? Here we go.

• As an affiliate marketer, you will definitely browse the web looking at other related websites. When you like a site, write a review about the site highlighting its benefits. Let the website publish this in return for linking to your website.
• Let other websites use your content on their website. Make sure your link appears in every article you publish. Also, the website you link with must be related to your website, with both looking at the same traffic.
• Let other affiliate marketers publish your ezine on their website. Every issue of your ezine must have your ad and your link. This will also serve in building your optin list with people subscribing to your ezine.
• Have you heard the concept of marketing your website in the form of a free web book? In the design element, make a title page, a table of contents and various chapters. Let people freely distribute this through a link to your website
• Be an article directory. Let your visitors get free content by linking to articles on your website. Make sure you have your website or product ad or banner at the top of the article directory at your main website.
• Permit related websites to use your forum or discussion board for their own visitors by linking directly to your discussion board. At the top of the discussion board, add your banner or ad.
• Membership sites are a great way to increase your loyal traffic. Start a membership site. You can highlight the benefits of being a member and offer no cost membership when the member links to your website.
• Invite affiliates to your affiliate program. Your visitors will earn a commission on each sale they make as well as display your affiliate link. It’s mutually beneficial.
• You also buy products. When you particularly like a product, write a detailed testimonial for it and send it to the business. Allow them to publish it on their website in return for linking to your website.
• Ever considered using a consultant? If you did you know how expensive they are. If you are an expert on a topic or subject, why not offer free online consulting? Let your clients link to your website in return for your advice. You’ll get traffic, and they save money.
• Identify complementary relevant websites related to yours and exchange content with them. This could be articles, top 5 or top 10 lists, with all including a resource box at the tail of the content.

Popularity: 11% [?]

We already know that success on the Internet is founded on niche marketing. This involves finding a niche market that is not too large. A list of relevant keywords is then made through research. The next step is to write keyword rich content that you can post on your website enabling your niche market to find you. Now here’s where a blog can be tremendously valuable because you can get massive amounts of free traffic.

Basically, a blog is like a simple website. You can start one with zero investment and publish your keyword rich content online. You’ve probably seen people use a blog as a personal diary or to just post news. The fact, however, is that you can use a blog as a niche site almost effortlessly. Blogs are the best way to keep adding fresh keyword rich content and making it available to your niche. It brings in heavy traffic much more quickly than your regular website - and blogs are perfect for niche marketing.

But don’t just set up a blog and keep posting content - also add categories and moveable type. Your category titles must preferably be your most important keywords. Remember the list of keywords you made when you researched your niche? Post relevant keyword rich content under each category. This is crucial because as you keep building the blog site, you’ll have hundreds of pages. Every page can be linked to the ten or so categories you’ve made. These links will be made of your best keywords and through these, your niche website will get a high ranking with the search engines since your category names are made of your keywords. It’s a fact that Google is partial to blogs in particular!

Niche blogs can be submitted to the special RSS and blog directories and start generating focused traffic right away. Interestingly, you’ll find that the kind of traffic you get from this source is a lot more than the search engines bring up. It is easy to find the top blog directories online and get yourself indexed. Each time a new post is added, you can ping these directories to alert them, inviting the search engine spiders to visit your site.

It is important at least initially to keep adding fresh content every day because this will make it attractive to the visitors as well as the largest search engines. Assuming you build a niche blog site that has at least thirty new entries by the time it is thirty days old, you can expect a big and steady flow of traffic.

Because of how easy it is and hardly costs anything, niche blog sites are the preferred way to reach the niche market since blogs are one of the vital places to find your niche site. You need not limit yourself to one blog. If you intend selling more than one product, you should set up a niche blog site for each of these products.

Popularity: 14% [?]

One of the easiest ways to boost traffic to your websites almost instantly is through social bookmarking. Bookmarking refers to the practice of saving bookmarks to a website. For example, suppose you are collecting information on Search Engine Optimization. You’d naturally be visiting a number of websites. One or two among these would stand out by offering you the most valid, up-to-date information. But you obviously don’t have the time to read it all and implement the techniques at once. What do you do? Simple. Just bookmark the specific website and visit it later. This is bookmarking.

A number of social bookmarking websites allow you to register with them and store your bookmarks and tags. Visitors who come to these sites search for information on a topic by keywords or tags that you, the registered user, have created. Most sites rank your websites based on the number of bookmarks to your site. So, the more bookmarks you earn, the higher your site is ranked.

Bookmarking, as you can see, is something that you absolutely MUST incorporate into your website marketing campaign. The advantage comes from the fact that it is one of the most effective ways to get quality inbound links. While you may get some amounts of direct traffic from bookmarking, your main aim is to woo search engines which love websites that have inbound links. Google calculates the importance of a website from the number of links to the website.

Obviously bookmarking your website manually is going to get tedious. The trick is to automate your bookmarking so you can post to multiple bookmarking sites without wasting your time and energy doing each one by hand.

Social news websites , on the other hand, are sites where users submit stories on their own products or services, or they link to articles others have created regarding these. Readers can read and comment on the relevancy and usefulness of the articles. The more number of readers you attract, the higher your visibility. Some syndication sites allow people to vote and rank websites depending on the number of votes the site receives.

Now, here is the interesting bit: of the nearly million registered users at digg.com, a mere 30 people contribute a third of the stories that hit the front page! The advantage? While voting occurs in large numbers, all the cool stuff is being provided by a small group of people. And that is the statistics for just ONE popular site. So, how much traffic do you think you can generate simply by submitting your Blog posts to different story submission services? There are hundreds of sites out there and all you need to do is find those that are relevant to your niche.

Both bookmarking and syndication are valuable additions to your traffic promotion and content exposure tactics. Together, they cover some of the best uses of Web 2.0 technologies and complement each other nicely. All you need in both cases is some good copywriting skills and some special attention paid to clear, effective titling. And of course, some amount of content generation on a regular basis. You’ll be surprised at how much serious web traffic you can generate using these two simple methods. And the best part is: you don’t even have to do it yourself, just automate the process and you can post to many services in one go! Driving traffic to your website just got as easy as write, click and go!

Popularity: 11% [?]