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You must have heard of the term "Quality Links". How about
"Quality Traffic"? "Quality links" means that the one way links
coming to your website are from reliable sources and the content
is related to yours. For example, if your website is about web
design and a link pointing to your site from the web design
section of msn website is considered as a quality link. "Quality
Traffic" means that the people who come to your website via
whatever channels are actually looking for something and have
better chances of using your services. They are looking for
something specific and your website can provide the answer and
make them stay longer. Quality links are important in search
engine optimisation as to Quality Traffic to sales generation.
Forum / Blog By participating in forums, you are exposing your
url to anyone who is reading your post. For example, if you
provide web design service, you might want to be more active in
the web design section of the forum because you know that the
people who are reading your post are people who are interested
in web design. The clicks from these people are usually more
valuable than clicks from any other tom, dick and harry. I would
recommend using only one link in your signature to avoid
confusion. Some people use alot of links in their signature for
SEO purposes and that actually defeats the whole idea of getting
quality traffic.
Many people leave their urls when participating in blog
discussions. Like forums, people who take time to read the blog
are interested in the topic. Depending on the popularity of the
blog, your url in the blog comments may provide you with quality
traffic.
Article Submission Article submission to websites and discussion
groups can reap great rewards. If your article is unique and
good, it might be duplicated in many websites and invites alot
of targeted readers. If the readers are impressed with the
content, the chances of them reading the bio at the end would be
high, and hence there is a good chance that they will click on
your url. Many people write articles for different reasons and I
find that many people like to stuff links in their content and
bio. I, too operate an article website and sometimes, I saw an
article so well written that I wanted to use it in my website
but the bio spoiled everything. There were too many links in the
author bio. I can understand from the search engine optimisation
perspective of putting links in the bio but it will become
harmful to my website (I am stingy about out-going links) and
annoying for the reader if the bio is stuffed with links. Some
links aren't even related to the author.
Online Advertisement / PPC Programs Another proven technique is
to advertise urls or banners in established websites. If you
noticed, Dell loves to advertise their products in MSN. Just
imagine how many people are surfing msn everyday and how many
people are looking at the banner...Intelligent use of words and
banners can lead to high volume of targeted leads to your
website. Such advertisements can be effective but very costly.
Therefore, most people tend to use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) programs
whereby your urls will only be displayed when certain keywords
are searched. The most notorious of all PPC programs is Google
Adwords.
Good SERPS Let us not all forget that the best way to get
quality leads is via organic search engine results. Though it
takes alot of hardwork and time to be ranked well in major
search engines, the effort will be rewarded in a long run. Once
you are ranked well in the Google especially, quality traffic
becomes almost unstoppable.
Offline Advertisement This is an area that is often overlooked.
Sometimes words of mouth can be even more effective than all of
the techniques mentioned above. I remembered how friendster used
to spread like a virus sometime ago and everyone were talking
about it everyday in schools, colleges..etc. This is how
powerful peer pressure can be. As long as something becomes
popular, everybody will go for it. Many traditional advertising
techniques such as putting your urls in brochures, magazines,
stands, t-shirts, cars...etc still works. Of all the offline
advertising techniques, I found newspaper ads really effective
especially if the newspaper is really popular. Offline
advertisements may well worked better for people who do not use
search engines alot.
There are other ways to get traffic but most of them are not
really effective. I will list 2 commonly used techniques
nowsadays:
Guaranteed Targeted Hits There are companies that promised
certain amount of quality hits for certain amount of money. This
service is very attractive for new website owners because it is
hard for a new website to get traffic. How does it work? By
using pop-up advertisements. There are also unethical companies
using automated scripts to generate hits. A quick way to
determine if this technique works for you is to check your web
statistics. If all the visitors from the "Guaranteed Targeted
Hits" program does not go beyond the landing page or generate
sales, then you should consider quitting the program. There are
also cases that this technique actually works for some
webmasters. For me, I will block all "pop-ups", "pop-downs",
"pop-unders"...etc whatever.
Hits Exchange Network Some websites offer hit exchanges, ie you
visit my website and I visit yours. It usually works on a point
system. The more websites you visit, the more points you get and
the system will show your links more frequently, bringing in
more hits for you. There is usually a timer to make sure that
you visit the site for at least 20 or 30secs before you can move
on to the next. I must admit that this is a very good and cheap
way to get free traffic but the traffic is not targeted. Most
users in the network visit your site just to get points and they
do not take your content seriously. I have joined many such
networks and none actually works for me.
Conclusion Quality Online Traffic is important for anyone who
provides an online service or runs an online business. Visitors
who arrived at your site with a purpose are more likely to make
purchases. This article discussed some of the common ways to
bring in quality traffic for your website, some online and some
offline. There are of cause many other ways not covered in this
article.
About the author:
Sitecritic.net Website
Reviews, Design Ideas is formed by a group of web addicts,
mainly volunteers from all over the world. Our goal is to create
a community of web designers and developers who share the common
interest in bringing out the best in creatiing effective web
sites.
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