Chapter 4 Become a Community Member
If you are starting a website, chances are that there is already an online community on the niche that you want to start yours in. Make sure that you become involved and join them. Don’t get so high and mighty that you think that everything that you write online should get you money. Write on other people’s blogs and websites too. Just make sure that you link back to your site. Usually, this is done in the signature and is one of the most effective ways of generating traffic to your site as long as what you write is worth reading. If the posting was good, people will come to your site just to read other articles written by you which is what you want.
Quote, but link
Another way is to quote from an article written elsewhere on the net. Usually, nobody minds you quoting as long as you give them credit for it and link back to their site as well. Not only is this good etiquette, but it will also improve your standing within the community which means that slowly, other more established people will start to link to your site.
Apart from the traffic that this linking generates, there is another more valuable reason for doing this. Most search engines do not index a website as soon as it is hosted. There are a number of people who create sites on free to use communities and then do not follow it up. Obviously, no search engine wants any site like this in their results. One way that they identify if a site is in use and is genuine is by the number of links back to it. If these links are from sites in good standing with the search engines, the chances of your site getting indexer faster are greater.
Use article directories
Another very popular way of getting these links back is by posting articles on article directories and then linking them to your site. There are many such article directories that allow you to upload content free although they have certain criteria about the kind of articles that you can upload. Ezine is only one among them and there are a number of others that you can post to.
What this does is help you upload a lot of content in places other than your website and then backlink to your website thus improving your standing with the search engines.
This is where you use the SEO optimization that you hear about frequently. There are two goals to doing this, one is the already mentioned improvement of ranking with search engines, and the other is that sometimes these articles will actually come up higher in the ranking than your site. If this happens you will be driving traffic to your site from there too.
The Newbie Guide to Traffic Generation
- Chapter 1 Increase Traffic to Your Website
- Chapter 2 Web Content
- Chapter 3 Don’t Send Newsletters
- Chapter 4 Become a Community Member
- Chapter 5 Get Experts to Write Articles
- Chapter 6 Use Tracking Software
- Chapter 7 Use of Keyword Tools
- Chapter 8 Copy Others
- Chapter 9 Focus on the Popular Portions of Your Site
- Chapter 10 Give Freebies
- Chapter 11 Advertise!
- Chapter 12 Build a Brand
- Chapter 13 The Right Software is Essential
- Chapter 14 Optimize Content
- Chapter 15 Meta-tags
- Chapter 16 Blog
- Chapter 17 Hold-off on Comments
- Chapter 18 Have a Sitemap
- Chapter 19 High Traffic Days!
- Chapter 20 Use Online Communities
- Chapter 21 Be Patient
- Chapter 22 Be Nice
- Chapter 23 Conclusion
