Driving quality traffic to your website

Getting thousands of people to visit a website is easy, but attracting several dozen people who want what you offer is more difficult. If the right people don't find you, you're just burning up the server's CPU for no good reason.

Quality trumps quantity when it comes to SEO.

Attracting quality visitors is still and probably always will be an SEO (search engine optimization) game. Some things never change, and I doubt strongly that this will ever change. As long as the Internet is a distributed network, finding what you want will be a matter of searching for it. Those things that get found the most will, over time, be the most often viewed. As search engines get better, those things that get found the most will be increasingly more relevant and useful.

SEO is about targeting. Understanding all factors in the formula will help you optimize your site for high-value keywords, but your content still has to be up to par.

You will have to figure out some of the tricks for yourself. Search engines change their algorithms all the time and you'll have to experiment constantly to see what works -- that's part of the fun of it.

And now, without further ado:

How to Make the Search Engines (and your visitors) Love You

• Update frequently. You probably already know this, but you might not know that it may be the most important part of website promotion and SEO. Add new posts and edit existing posts regularly. The spiders like that, and so do the search algorithms at the time of this writing. As it happens, human beings also appreciate freshness. If you want people to come back (and you definitely do), give them new stuff all the time.
• Link OUT. This came as a surprise to me, but pages with a lot of outgoing links are likely to be ranked higher. Everybody knows that you need incoming links, but outgoing links are just as good in the long run. They're a good way to get the coveted incoming links. When people see that you're linking to them, they'll link back to you. Plus, (just theorizing here) in terms of search engine logic, it makes you seem like more of an authority if you can recommend other resources.
• Post comments to other blogs. These must be relevant, thoughtful comments, but they bring people to your site. They might (there is debate on this because of the nofollow tag) count as incoming links. Regardless of whether or not they count as incoming links, they drive traffic.
• CraigsList is awesome! You have to be creative here, and I'm not going to reveal any of the specifics. Let's just say that a lot of people use CraigsList. Don't you dare ruin it with a bunch of spam, though! As with comments on other blogs, offer something valuable to the community members.
• Submit articles to the big article directories. EZine Articles is a good one because they vet for quality. If you can write well, they will publish your articles. Links go in the "Resources" section. It was amazing to watch the traffic flow after my first article went up, plus I got a couple of quality incoming links. There are plenty of high-traffic article sites out there -- use them. A lot of sites pull the RSS feeds from article directories so you'll benefit greatly from that in the first few days of posting your articles.
• Most importantly of all, produce quality content! You will get no love if you give nothing. This is the Golden Rule because it ultimately drives all your high-quality traffic. At one of my sites, almost 40 percent of the visitors bookmark, and more than half the traffic comes from direct addressing or bookmarks. The traffic at that site has built steadily and reliably as a result. From a business perspective, repeat traffic is good because returning visitors like what you have to offer so if you offer something for sale, they just might buy it.

While I hope this article was helpful to you as a webmaster, I have not revealed all my secrets. In fact, I have intentionally omitted at least one crucially important component of an easy-to-find and interesting site. If you find the above article helpful, you'll be blown away by what I can do for a little money. Contact me.

Turning visits and page views into dollars is an entirely different story. More on that later.