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	Monday, September 26, 2005

Getting Traffic  (techdrivenlife)   (selected articles in bizdrivenlife compiled)   These are some of my loose recollections of what to do in order to get traffic.  This is just a beginners guide. Many fine articles are available in the web on how to get better traffic. One of the best ways is to put a search on Search Engine Optimization.   What is the purpose of maintaining a website?  Normally, for a business site, to enhance your business.  Nobody wants to be a webmaster of a website where there are no visitors.  Much like opening a store, the more people who visit the better.  Even if it is a personal website, or a personal blog page, you want more people to visit.  That, after all, is the promise of the internet.  With almost a billion people now surfing daily, why can't we even get a hundred visitors to visit us per day?   So things like properly designing a website, making it 'sticky' so people want to return, are important. Of course, one way to get more visitors to visit is to make sure that all your company documents and correspondence carry your web site address, and you advertise or let as many people know as much as possible.  The other is trying to make sure people want to come back – and that is to make sure your website is interesting and up to date.  Who wants to go to the website, when you visit last quarter, and yesterday, it was exactly the same?  That is the reason why merchants change their shop windows every few weeks, or every so often. You want to inform people that you have something new always to offer.   The other way to build up traffic is through search engines. Evidently, over a hundred million engine searches are made everyday, some say even more than two hundred million.  So, being properly listed in search engines, and make sure that when people search the directory they will find you -- much akin as you advertise in the yellow pages .  If you are a computer company in Manila, you want to make sure that when people go to the Manila yellow pages directory, and search for computers, you would come out prominently and visibly.   Currently, there are over a thousand search engines, but estimates that only three search engines handle over 90% of all searches – and that is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.  So you want to know how to be prominent there.  Let us talk about Google, which is the number 1 search engine currently.   There are 2 ways to do this -- first is you want to get prominent ranking, and second is you want to advertise. When you do a search on google, on let us say, computers, you will find two answers.  First on the left are the websites that google feels is most relevant to your search.  This is not paid , but google ranks you based on the relevance of your website to the person's search.  The right side will also presents some websites that deals with computers, but this time, in the form of advertisements.   Google allows you to advertise your website through www.google.com/adwords.  In here, you choose how you plan to advertise, what kind of keywords you want to bid on ( how much you are willing to pay to be clicked), and other features.   So it goes without saying that if you are willing to pay a lot of money, the higher you get into the advertisers ranking, and the more frequent you will come out. However, you have to pay everytime you come out, or everytime your link is clicked.  This can get very expensive.   If you want free advertising, then what you need to do is to try to work out your site so that it will come out prominently in the ranking.  This is desirable, because of 2 things. First, is most people will not click on advertisements, but rather on the results of the search.  And second of course, is that it does not cost money.  And of course, it is important to be ahead in the search, since most people ( even with thousands of results) will most likely see the first 20 or 30 results only.   For your website to be well ahead in this search will bring enormous new traffic to your site.  Needless to say, there are thousands of debates and thousands of offers in the internet on how to do this. All you have to do is to a search on SEO which is the acronym of Search Engine Optimization, and you will find thousands of theories, and thousands of offerings on how to come out ahead on Google and Other searches.   The way google does this is complex, but there is one thing though that we know for a fact – Google, and now increasingly almost every search engines scour all web sites, and rank them.  The higher your rank, the more higher you go on the search.  And the basic principle is one—your web site will rank higher the more people connect to your site .  This was the fundamental principle the founder of Google, Larry Page and Sergei Bren learned while they were studying in Stanford.  If you have good academic material, you would be cited a lot in academic journals, something like a reference.  The more famous and authoritative your work, the more other writers will quote you.  They brought that to the internet world and therefore rank websites and pages depending on how many sites connect to it.  So, we do know ( but there are many) that the more websites connect to you, the higher your ranking will be.   The way to optimize the ranking is quite complex, but hopefully at least, you know the most important one.  Try to make your websites as well researched, and authoritative as possible, and people who think your website is cool or relevant, will link to you, and that will increase your rankings.   At the end, there is the tricks of the trade, and there is learning the trade.  Designing websites is just like any other activity.  The best way to get people interested in you is to be interested in them. This is another way to get traffic that is increasingly not being recognized.  It is simply to visit and link to other web sites. Visit them, read them, and give them good comments to show that you are interested in their topic. You do that a couple of times, and it is more likely than not that these bloggers will come visiting your site.     1:43:39 AM     comment []   trackback []