Affordable Website Promotion

30 Jul

You may have heard of RSS feeds, but what exactly are they and how do they work? And can they really drive more traffic to your website?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds are a quick and easy way of sharing information on your website. But, how do they work and how can they create more traffic to your website? Well, there are 2 ways of using RSS feeds and each one gives slightly different traffic generation, so I'll look at them separately.

Existing Readers
If you are visiting another website that you find really interesting, you might want to make sure that you can keep going back to find the latest information. For example, it might be your favourite news website or a blog with really great information.

But how do you quickly and easily check a few websites for the latest updates, especially news sites that maybe do not always have the latest item as the lead item? Well this is where RSS feeds come in - you can subscribe to the feed in whatever feed reader you want. For example, in Firefox you would just drag the feed item to the tool bar and a new feed is create. By clicking on the feed the latest entries are shown. If any take your interest you click on them to read them.

So for existing readers, RSS feeds are a way of getting the latest information off websites that they like to visit quickly and easily. So by having an obvious RSS feed that they can subscribe to, you are making sure that people can keep coming back to your website every time you post an interesting new piece of information. You are driving traffic direct to your new pages - traffic that has already visited your website and built confidence in you.

RSS Feeds For Websites
But this is only getting existing visitors back. Whilst vital and high quality traffic, you also want to generate new traffic to your website and RSS feeds can also do this. Some website owners are looking for content and so they will also use the RSS feeds to grab your latest work and place the articles on their websites, usually with links back to your website. This means that people visiting these other websites and reading your posts there can then pop over to your website if they find something interesting.

Obviously, this works best when you allow the RSS feed to syndicate the full content of the post. Some people like to only syndicate a summary for protection of their content, in fear of having it stolen, but others are happy to share it in the hope of increased traffic. It is your website and really it is up to you, and your experiences, whether you allow it.

So that is what RSS Feeds are about - building more traffic to your website quickly and easily by sharing the content that you are creating with readers and other websites. Make sure that your RSS Feed is easy to find so that people can use yours and start to build your traffic with them today!

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25 Jul

There are 3 basic keys you need to make sure that you are getting lots of visitors from the search engines. So, read this article, review your website and see if you can increase your website traffic quickly!

Yes, there really are just 3 keys to a successful search engine traffic campaign. On the whole, they are quite simple. You just need to keep working at them over and over again to make sure that they are working for you. Anyone can do it, so follow this 3 point plan to increase your search engine marketing results.

Key 1 - Plenty of unique, fresh content.
Whilst sourcing articles from article directories can be very useful, just limit yourself to a few from each one and concentrate on your own, unique writing. Maybe leave the article directories for when you are short on time, on holiday or whatever.

Search engines will quickly pick up that your website is full of content that can also be found elsewhere, so if there is nothing unique, why should they send visitors to you? Give the search engines something to want to send people to you for.

It is also important to be adding plenty of new material so that the search engines know that your site is maintained, that the content is up to date and relevant and that they are not sending their visitors to an outdated website with information that could mislead.

Key 2 - Plenty of relevant, useful incoming links.
Inbound links, through articles, guest posts, forums, blog commenting and the likes all show to the search engines that your site is popular in some way and make them want to send you more visitors.

Search engines see all of these other sites linking to you and this shows your site is popular for the relevant keywords and they want to jump onto the bandwagon of recommending you for these keywords.

But don't just make the links all use high power keywords and link to your home page. Link also to main internal pages and vary the link text, so that it looks natural and you spread the efforts to different areas.

Key 3 - A sensible and well structured website navigation.
Without a good site navigation, information will get lost and so will your visitors. This is one of the reasons why blogs are so powerful as they file away posts under categories, tags and archives and it is easy to get to the old posts.

Your navigational needs will depend on the size of your website and how many pages it has, but make sure that it is easy to get to all of the pages from the home page and pay special attention to key information pages. Maybe make these link from the home page or even every page.

If you can't get from the home page to the information in a few steps, then the search engines and your visitors certainly won't be able to do so either!

Yes, that's it! Write plenty of your own content, get plenty of links back to your site and make sure that the navigation links on your website are easy for search engines and visitors to follow and with these 3 keys you should be seeing plenty of website traffic!

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23 Jul

Promoting Your Website

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The more I look into the situation, the more firmly I believe that there is a three part structure to increasing search engine traffic.

Step 1 is creating website content that will entice the search engines to send you visitors and interests visitors when they get there. The quality of the content is vital, as we will see in step three.

But, if you need help in Web content development then do seek help. It is an important step to get right.

Step 2 is building some incoming links from a variety of interesting websites. From guest posts on other blogs to articles to link baiting and a variety of other tricks. These all demonstrate to the search engines that your site is popular with other websites.

Step 3 is increasing traffic to your website. This sounds a bit backwards, but Google is tracking your website visitors the best it can and can use this to determine whether real people like your site.

So, if you have good traffic, RSS readers and your visitors read several pages, then you have proven to Google that your site is popular with people and worthy of sending traffic to.

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22 Jul

Should you look at hits, page views or unique visitors. What are bounces? Is it important to review how people are visiting your site and the browsers that they are using? How many more questions can you ask about traffic stats?

Website traffic stats can, at best, be a little confusing. What is the huge difference between hits, page views and unique visitors? Which is most important and what should you look at and how do you interpret and analyze web traffic views?

Hits, Page Views and Unique Visitors
Three simple terms that people often confuse! Hits are usually the count of the individual files that have been accessed on your website, so a single page load could include the html, several images and a css file or two.

Page views should be self explanatory - the number of pages that have been accessed by your visitors.

And unique visitors is the number of different people visiting your website, hopefully tracked over a decent time period so that people that come back each day and each week still only count as one.

Which of these is important?
Ignore hits - these are only usually available through server stats anyway, not through the major third party reporting. But page views and unique views need to be looked at together.

Ideally you want both figures to be high and depending on the size of your site there should not be a 1 : 1 relationship. The higher page views is compared to unique visitors the more pages each individual visitor is looking at. If this ratio is high, people are coming onto your site, finding it interesting and looking around. If it is 1 : 1, either you are a single page website or they are not interested in the site.

Obviously, the higher the unique visitors figure the more people that are visiting the site and that is certainly good! It is also interesting to look, if you can, at how long a time period visitors are returning over. Are you building a relationship with them so that they keep coming back?

Bounces And Time On Page
This is something else to look at and study carefully. A high number of bounces means that a lot of your visitors are reading one page and then leaving the website. Either they get what they want off that landing page, or they don't like the site or its information. Time on the page should tell you which. If they are there for seconds then they don't like the site, if they are there for long enough to read the page and digest it, then they are getting what they want.

Different Browsers
You should also look at the different browsers that people are using to view your website and see if any particular browsers have higher / lower bounce rates than other browsers. If one has a particularly high bounce rate then it could be a sign that there is a problem with that browser displaying a page properly. Likewise, does looking at people with different version of flash or javascript enabled show different bounce rates, if you are using either of them?

This is just a basic starter list of a few thing to look at when you try to interpret and analyze web traffic views. There are lots more, but follow these and take actions and you might just increase your traffic.

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22 Jul

I've moved the RSS Feeds on this site to Feedburner and the process was fairly easy and a pleasant surprise!

Considering it was the first of 4 blogs to be moved, it was easy. No problems, it just worked first time. The shame was that the following day when I moved the other three, not one of them worked first time.

Beginner's luck!

But anyway, all 4 blogs are now using Feedburner and it is good to see that there are actually people using the RSS feeds and popping over to read what I am writing! Thank you one and all there! Do feel free to leave a comment and say hello once in a while. And if there is anything that you would like me to write about, let me know.

If you are, like I have been all morning, struggling to get Feedburner to work, then the answer it seems is simple. On WordPress, the new feed does not activate until a new post has been published. So, burn the feed, install the plugin, tell it your feed's name and then welcome the world with a new post.

It only took me 2 hours to discover that the new post was the key to the whole change over process!

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