Monday, 10 November 2008

How To Increase Web Site Traffic For Free?

There are many ways to get traffic to your website, but if you know how to use article marketing to increase web site traffic for free then you should be on to a winner in the website traffic stakes.

You only have to consider what article marketing can do for you and it becomes a no brainer. It is such an obvious way to get traffic to your website that even if you cannot write for yourself, then you should employ an article ghostwriter. Just consider what even one article can do for your website, let alone dozens. Let’s have a look at what is involved in writing an article, and what benefits it can give you.

First, your article must be relevant to the theme of your website. I know it sounds obvious, but don’t write about cats if your site is about dogs. I know . . . Laugh! However, that’s what some people do! Stupid, I know, but it happens, so that is why I am stressing here that you must write about the theme of your website.

Next, your article must provide good content. It must provide useful information, but it must also be well written. The adage that ‘as long as it can be understood’ does not hold water in article writing The spelling must be correct for the country (USA or UK) and the grammar must be reasonable. Nobody expects perfect grammar but it must be free from silly errors such as “They is American and we is not” sort of thing.

These are the basics. If you can’t write grammatical English and find it difficult to express your thoughts in writing then again, as previously suggested, employ a ghostwriter to write your article for you. Now we come to the aspects of article marketing that enable you to draw traffic to your website, since that is the whole objective of writing articles.

First you must submit your article to as many article directories as you can... It is possible to do this manually by trawling the search engines and finding as many article directories as possible. However, you could save a lot of time if you used article submission software, available on the internet at varying prices, or use an article submission subscription service. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

If you buy the software you have to be sure that it is regularly updated to include new directories, but if you use submission services, where you assume that this will be done, it cane be very expensive. I have used both and still do so, though the monthly subscriptions would probably pay for the most expensive and sophisticated software systems in a year or so. Subscription services always seem cheaper because you are only paying a little each month.

Most, but not all, article directories provide you with an ‘author’s resource box’ in which you can provide a few lines about yourself and a link to your website. You could do what most people do and provide a short biography then provide a link to your home page, or do as I do and simply state “More information on …….. Can be found at ………”

The dots should be the topic of your article and the page on your website where more information is available on that topic. If you are writing about basketball, don’t give them a link for baseball. Don’t even provide the link for your home sports page. Make sure the click leads the reader to what they have been reading about - basketball. The whole idea is to get focused visitors to the web page that deals with the topic of your article.

That’s why any article that you submit to article directories has to be based on a subject on which you have a web page. If you don’t, then your article is a waste. It will do nothing for you.

The benefits that a well-written article that readers are interested in can provide are fourfold. First, readers can click on your link and provide you with traffic to the page concerned. In order to get them clicking your article must not only be of interest, but your resource box must be of equal interest. If a reader thinks that you can be of help to them, then they will want to know more.

Secondly, you get a one-way link back to your site from each directory that accepts your article. The more you submit to, the more links you get. However, that is not all, because the third benefit is that readers might be so impressed with the quality of your writing and the content of your article that they will copy it and paste it onto their own site. This not only gives you another link back to your website, but also provides you with the fourth benefit: readers of that site clicking on your web page link that has to be kept intact by anyone copying it for their own site.

It is quite true that if you know how to use article marketing to increase web site traffic for free, then you are on to a winner because traffic can be so expensive these days. Free traffic through writing and marketing articles is worth its weight in gold, and so are the writers than can give your web pages a massive boost up the rankings.