Traffic Building Basics

When it comes to building website traffic, you have two options: buy or trade. Depending on the situation, one will no doubt be more favorable. Even so, most professional web developers use some combination of the two. For the purpose of this introduction, I'll be discussing the general how of building traffic, and not the specifics of trading or buying.

The Big Three

Within the realm of traffic building, you have three major components: content, onpage optimization, and offpage optimization. Content is the cornerstone, and it's rather straightforward. The better your service, product, or information, the easier and more natural traffic building will become. Onpage optimization refers to things you can do within the HTML code and text of your webpages to make your site more attractive to search engines. Offpage optimization refers to building inbound links to your site containing keywords relevant to your goals.

Good Content

Having a website with useful information, services, or products is the prerequisite. Good content makes or breaks your traffic building efforts. This doesn't mean you have to come up with original, ground breaking material - it just means you need to have some content visitors will find worth checking out. However, having really great, original content that can't be found elsewhere can be a phenominal promotion machine in and of itself. That's known as creating niche content.

Onpage Optimization

On the SEO end of traffic building, onpage optimization acts as a multiplier for offpage optimization. In other words, it's something you should do, assuming you are also working on offpage optimization.

The first step in promoting a website is deciding what keyword combinations to target. To get some ideas what people are searching for when looking for your content, look at your competitors and use tools like Overture's Keyword Selector Tool. What then? Start small. Instead of trying to tackle a huge keyword like SEO right away, go for smaller combinations that contain the keyword you'd eventually like to be in top position with. Unless you have a mass of resources, trying to get 3000 backlinks with SEO as the anchor text to crack the top 10 of that broad keyword is going to be alot of wasted effort. Instead, try getting 100 backlinks with the anchor text SEO Basics. Since the competition is far less fierce, you'll break the top 10 of SEO Basics much more easily. Also, target DIFFERENT, specific keyword combinations for EVERY page of your site. Once you've got a couple keyword combinations nailed down for a given page, you can apply them using these rules:

• Put your keywords in the TITLE tag of your HTML, and don't dilute it by using any unnecessary words
• Use H1 and H2 tags to separate content on your page, and put your keywords in those tags
• Try to use the exact keyword combinations a few times within the text
• Try to make your main keyword combination both the first and last text on the page (or very close)
• Use bold or strong tags on your keywords once somewhere within the text. Don't overdo it!
• Learn to use meta tags properly, particularly the keywords and description tags
• Use CSS stylesheets to remove as much style information from your actual page as possible
• Use a .js file for javascript functions and big chunks of code

The point here is that you want to achieve the highest concentration of content in the actual HTML file, with only necessary structure tags. This has to do with keyword density algorithms used by search engines. Basic rule of thumb: If it can be stored in an external file and called from within the page, do it. This way it won't count against your keyword density. Look at the source code on this page for an example. Virtually all the style information is placed in a CSS file, leaving only necessary HTML code.

Offpage Optimization

Offpage optimization is where you can multiply the effects of those onpage elements to achieve top rankings. It's also where Backlinks Builder will really kick in and save you time. The first step is to identify the page you want linked, and the keywords you want in the anchor text of the link. This way you can build the hyperlink to specifically target your keywords. When you've done this your link code should look something like:

<a href="http://www.example.com/widgets/blue-widgets.html" title="Blue Widgets">Blue Widgets</a>

Now all that's left is to get that link code on as many websites related to widgets as possible. Quantity is good, but quality is far better. When targetting widgets, 10 links from websites with lots of information on widgets is better than 100 links from websites with unrelated topics. Not only are visitors coming from sites related to widgets more likely to be shopping for widgets, but search engines will also see sites with widget information referring visitors to your site. This will raise your credibility in the search engine view with regards to widgets, once again multiplying your offpage optimization efforts.

That's about it for traffic building basics.