How does a webmaster increase the number of visitors to a website?
The first step is to submit their sites to search engines. Use the links bellow:
- Google. The No. 1 search engine
- Yahoo ! Free submission, but requires registration
- Bing (formerly MSN and live.com)
- Ask.com (sitemap is required)
- Cuil.com (email is requested)
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Most search engine above feed search results of other ones, so by submitting to them, you are submitting your site to several search engines.
You may try other search engines, but in our modest opinion, it does not worth.
A complete list of search engines is available at Wikipedia.
For better indexing of your Website, do not forget to include Meta Tags
in all your pages, and to add a robots.txt file in your site's main folder.
Additionaly, Site maps can improve search engine optimization of your site by making sure that all the pages can be found.
Submitting my site is enough?
No. Indexing will take up to 8 weeks, but this is not enough to start getting visitors.
Being in the top search results depends mostly (but not only) on popularity of your site,
and a new site is not popular at all. Google's PageRank
is the reference link analysis algorithm for importance/popularity of a webpage.
The higher is the PageRank, the more visitors are likely to visit you by searching in search engines.
In case you are using a popular free hosting service, robots may never visit your site.
It is convenient to have your own site with your own domain name. In case you have not got it,
check 6 international extensions in only one click here
(fast search without graphics). For registration, it has no sense to pay over $10 per year
(check for "register domain"
at search engines).
Simple strategy to increase popularity
Let's suppose you site includes a html tutorial. You will need to search for "html tutorial" at google
(or other search engine). Search results will show a list of sites. Copy the URL of one site which is related
to your topic (for example "www.htmltutor.com" and find who is linking to them in the net by searching
at Google for "link:http://www.htmltutor.com". Some of the pages linking to that site are probably pages
including links to several html tutorials. Visit them one by one and ask webmaster to add a link to your site.
This procedure is very time consuming, but it is very effective to increase your position at search engines.
In case you already have a website, consider adding a link to your new page.
Paid links to your site
To increase the popularity of your website you may search for pages where you will like a link to your page to be included.
As you must try to increase the popularity of your webpage, the page where your page is included must be popular
(it is important to check the Google's PageRank of the page). You may request a deal to the webmaster for the inclusion.
The cost for the inclusión of your link could be in most cases somewhere between $5 to $25 per month.
Some services, as for example will allow your to include your links in their affiliate's network. But buying links may also become a problem, as described in this article.
Pay-per-click search engines
Perhaps you need to increase very fast the number of visitors to your site, or it worth to you paying to
get visitors. In this case, pay-per-click
search engines may be an interesting option for you. The procedure is simple: users will search for keywords
in the search engine, and they will get a list of results. The top results correspond to paid listings.
In case you click on them, the owner of the site will be charged. The minimum cost of this kind of service is about $0.05 per click.
If your keywords are very common, to be listed in the very top may be very expensive (for example: the top position for "hosting" at
mayor search engines is by sure over $1.00 per click).
Use this search suggestion tool to find keywords.
Pay-per-click search engines may be very interesting to make your site visible (mostly in case your keyword is very specific to
an specific subject, and there are few pages about that subject in the web). Consider this option as an inversion.
Getting traffic to your website for under $0.01 per visit
Some services offer incredible deals, as for example 1,000 visits for $5.00 or less. It is not real traffic.
Those services use pop-up windows to provide you the traffic that no one will read.
Often, they will indicate that your page cannot contain pop-up windows, and when using these service it is
very common to find that your page is visited but the images are not visualized, or that the same visitors access
your pages regularly (for example ones per minute for one or two hours). Again: it is not real traffic, so do not use it.
There are also some very cheap traffic providers which will provide "real" visitors. Those companies will pay your visitors for clicking the
link to your website in an email, and you will hardly visit additional pages in your websites.
Of course, they are serious service which will promote your website by email, but you will pay in most cases a fixed amount per email
and the email will be send to persons who have joined a distribution list related to specific topics.
They will probably charge over 5 cents per email. Just as an example of this kind of traffic providers, check this link.
Banner exchange programs
Banner exchange services may be interesting for you,
but do not rely only on this services to increase the number of visitors to your site. In case your Banner is atractive
enough you will get up to 5 visits per 1000 banners displayed in other sites. And you will need to display another 1000
banners in your site (or more) from other companies. So it is not very effective.
Submission to over 700.000 directories and search engines
Some sites will provide this kind of service. Of course, they will send your website to google, and they will acount
as search engines all websites that provide google results in their search results. The same for other search engines (Yahoo...).
Submit manually your website to the search engines in the top of this page and forget this kind of services.
Some times, those service will ask you for your email or inclusion of an specific code for banners in your page.
In case they are sending your link to directories your email will become very popular and you will get a lot of spam.
The only potential benefit of this services is that your site may be found by robots throught links in those directories
(but robots are also prepared to recognize these directories, and they will not index most of them).
Provide something free at your site
Unless you website is very professional (this page is not for you) or directed to a very specific visitors (so that it could
be easily found in search engines), your may consider including free info/staff in your website. Let's suppose your page is related
to your business. You may create a page about the history of your town, about the history of some products sold in your business, or
include a page about events in your town (this one requires updating regularly). Those information sources may be of great interest
for someone in the net, and that visitor may arrive to your site when finding the info provided in your website. Some visitors may
become clients. Additionally, the more interesting is the information, the more options are for that specific page to became popular
(a PageRank to be established). As the page with information will contain a link to your main page (ad a link to your main page in all your pages),
your main page will also increase its popularity.
It is convenient the pages with information to be original (not a copy of another page in the web; you may obtain information
from different sources, but use your own words), and it must contain at least 500 words.
You may also included tools for entertainment in your pages. The advantage of this entertainment pages is basically the
same described above for the ones containing information . A simple option is to include
html/javascript games in your pages.
Of course, try the entertainment page to be adequate to your site's content.
Getting money from ads in your site
Most sites will be unable to pay expenses until they are getting about 10,000 unique visitors per month.
So do not place ads in your site unless you are having those visitors. The cheapest
hosting services
will be enough to handle this amount of visitors.
Articles for webmasters (by 11articles.com)
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