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202 Tips to increase your traffic!

Yann de Champlain — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 13:58:35 +0000

Hi,

This list is so important if you work at home using online website like I do you canb't live without this . It is a copy paste from a thread at DigitalPoint. Sorry about that.

This 101 is for any website or almost. Following this one, is another more related to blogs.

1) Yahoo Answers.

2) Myspace.com

3) Yahoo Groups

4) Stumbleupon.com

5) Forums

6) Craigslist.org

7) Site maps

8. E-Book Giveaway

9) Website Design

10) Submit To Directories

11) Tell a Friend

12) Search Engine Optimization

13) Squidoo.com

14) Social bookmarking sites

15) Article Promotion

16) Site Explorer

17) Epinion.com

18. Alexa.com

19) Newsletter Box

20) Scribd

21) Get Links from Relevant Websites

22) Increase the Size of Your Site

22) Send out Press Releases

23) Advertise On Online classified Ad Sites

24) Use Firefox Plug-in

25) Add a Forum to Your Site

26) Add a Blog to Your Site

27) Optimize Your Blog for The Search Engines

28. Comment on Other Peoples Blogs

29) MySpace News

30) Digg

31) Banner Exchanges

32) Traffic Exchanges

33) Pop Unders

34) Technorati and ping it when your blog content changes

35) Use a ping service like pingomatic to ping RSS aggregators

36) Submit your blog to all of the RSS directories

37) Link to other blogs in your posts

38. Use Stumbleupon to stumble your posts.

39) Ask your readers to submit your posts to social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, etc.)

40) Start a group blog.

41) Join SpicyPage and promote your blog

42) Join a webring.

43) Sign up for BlogWoods and promote your blog

44) Exchange Ads (not blogroll links) with complementary blogs.

45) Trade blog roll links with related blogs.

46) Use Twitter

47) Publish videos on YouTube

4 Search for Wikis related to your.

49) Join Hub pages and post links to your blog from articles you write.

50) Pray.

51) Create a MySpace Page. Put your blog on it, and get some friends.

52) Tell people you will link back to them if they review your blog

53) Most brands are not well established online, you review related content and it will rank well.

54) Review relevant products on Amazon.com.

55) Create product lists on Amazon.com

56) Review related sites on Alexa

57) Review products and services on shopping search engines.

58. Swap some links.

59) Try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages.

60) Sell items on eBay.

61) Target niche social news sites like DZone, Sphinn or Hugg

62) Whenever you send an email to someone, always add your website url as a signature.

63) Do email signature swaps

64) Tag blog posts at social bookmarking sites

65) Add photos to your blog with appropriate keywords Google Images generates traffic too.

66) Tag blog photos at Flicker

67) Make a custom 404-error page for your website. You can provide a link back to your main website or even try to monetize it by offering a related affiliate program within your niche.

68. Outsource grunt work.

69) After someone orders from you offer a one-time offer that compliments your product.

70) Participate in Blog Carnivals

71) create a network of blogs in different niches, and then link them together

72) Give away stock images with a wee watermark of your URL

73) Find and discuss memes

74) Create a Yahoo Group in the niche your site sits.

75) Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and if youre really keen, add a Del.icio.us button to your homepage.

76) Place a free ad for your company on Gumtree.

77) Syndicate your sites content by using an RSS feeds.

7 Submit your RSS feeds to aggregator sites.

79) Dont worry about PageRank worrying about PageRank is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.*

80) Get a custom t-shirt made with your website URL on it, and wear it often.

81) Get a custom t-shirt made with your website URL on it, and wear it often.

82) Send out a newsletter!

83) Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.

84) Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products.

85) Add a Tell a Friend function to your site, so people can easily recommend you to their mates.

86) Share your banners on banner exchange sites.

87) Create a lense for your site on Squidoo

8 Do you have really hot content on your site that geeks would love? If so Slashdot will bring you a mass of traffic.

89) upload a favicon.gif file so that your users have a nice icon when they bookmark your site.

90) Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search

91) Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

92) Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

93) Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts.

94) Increase the list you ping

95) Use Facebook

96) Social Networking

97) Micro

9 Email Marketing

99) RSS Feeds

100) Get outside links to internal pages

101) Use free hosting and build sites and link them back to your main site.

This one is more about Blogs. I did a cut and paste from this excellent one:

http://www.canimakebigmoneyonline.com/index.php/20070517-101-free-ways-to-increase-your-blog-traffic/

101 FREE Ways To Increase Your Blog Traffic

Written by George Manty May 17, 2007

I am a bit behind where I would like to be with my blog traffic series. So I decided to write this post listing 101 ways to get traffic to your blog. Then I will take some (not all) of these points and talk about them in detail in my series on getting blog traffic.

Here goes, 101 ways to get traffic to your blog:

1. Join MyBlogLog, add friends, and join communities.
2. Sign up for Technorati and ping it when your blog content changes.
3. Use a ping service like pingomatic to ping RSS aggregators.
4. Submit your blog to all of the directories on Robin Goods list of RSS directories.
5. Use trackbacks.
6. Leave comments on blogs in related niches.
7. Tell your friends about your blog and specific posts.
8. Put your blog URL in your forum signatures.
9. Create link bait.
10. Tell Your newsletter subscribers about your blog.
11. Write press releases for your blog.
12. Link liberally to other blogs in your posts (many bloggers check who links to them).
13. Tag your posts using Technorati tags or a tag plug-in.
14. Submit your posts to multiple social bookmarking sites using OnlyWire.
15. Use Stumbleupon to stumble your posts.
16. Answer questions on Yahoo answers with the answers on your blog.
17. Answer questions on forums related to your niche with a link to one of your blog posts that answers the question.
18. Set up a feed on MyYahoo so that Yahoo keeps better track of your blog.
19. Make lists (My Top 5, Ten Things, etc.). Many of the most popular blog posts are lists like this one.
20. Use pictures. Most of the top trafficed blogs use pictures in their posts.
21. Use video on your blog.
22. Find out what people want to learn about in your blogs niche and write about it.
23. Be the first to break a news story.
24. Use keyword research to find good keywords to use in your posts.
25. Write controversial posts.
26. Strongly Agree or strongly disagree with other bloggers and write about it with a link to their post.
27. Make it easy for your readers to sign up for your RSS feed.
28. Make it easy for your readers to Digg your posts.
29. Ask your readers to submit your posts to social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, etc.).
30. Interview well known people in your industry (its working well for me).
31. Give credit to the blogs that inspire your posts.
32. Dont be boring.
33. Write for beginners.
34. Participate in group writing projects.
35. Participate in blog memes.
36. Create a blog meme and tag your friends.
37. Participate in blog carnivals.
38. Post at different times of the day.
39. Submit your best posts to article directories.
40. Write Killer Content .
41. Start a group blog. These tend to get more traffic, because more people are creating conent and more people are promoting it.
42. Have guest posters.
43. Create a blog meme and tag an A-list blogger who you like.
44. Submit your blog to regular web directories (like DMOZ, etc.).
45. Join SpicyPage and promote your blog on it.
46. Join a blog webring.
47. Sign up for BlogWoods and promote your blog on it.
48. Join LinkAndBlog and do link and blog challenges.
49. Submit your best posts to Netscape.
50. Exchange Ads (not blogroll links) with complementary blogs.
51. Trade blog roll links with related blogs.
52. Sign up for Rojo. Subscribe to your feed and click add mojo on your better articles.
53. Add a plug-in to notify users of new comments (I REALLY need to do this).
54. Make it easy for your visitors to submit your post to ALL social bookmarking sites (not just Digg).
55. Add a tell-a-friend script or plug-in to your posts.
56. Make it easy for your visitors to bookmark your page in their browser.
57. Make it easy for people to link to your blog.
58. Use easy to read fonts.
59. Use a professional looking blog design.
60. Make your blog easy to navigate.
61. Highlight your most popular posts.
62. Write posts that ask provocative questions.
63. Use questions for the title of your blog posts (you knew that was coming).
64. Use good keywords in your post titles.
65. Reply to every question you get through email.
66. Reply to every question you get on your blog.
67. E-mail other bloggers about your really good post(s) (breaking news posts).
68. Offer free stuff related to your niche (tools, ebooks, etc).
69. Run a contest.
70. Publish videos on YouTube with the URL for your site at the beginning and end of the video.
71. Install a translation plug-in or use a translation service to translate your blog into foreign languages.
72. Put Your URL on everything that goes out of your house (business cards, stationary, mailing labels, etc.).
73. Go through listible.coms list of web 2.0 sites and promote your blog on all web 2.0 sites that apply.
74. Search for Wikis related to your niche to submit your blog to. For example, for this blog the search phrase would be make money online wiki or internet marketing wiki.
75. Give regular polls (use a poll plug-in like democracy for this).
76. Add trivia quiz pages.
77. Add ecard pages.
78. Add a forum for your visitors to discuss more on your niche.
79. Add a wiki to your blog .
80. Join Hubpages and post links to your blog from articles you write.
81. Join Blink List and make a list of blogs with your blog in it.
82. Join 43 Things and write a list of 43 things you want to achieve (include your blog url in the list).
83. Join Blogger Party (and/or other free blog systems). Then write posts that link back to your blog.
84. Make a Squidoo lens (or more than one) with a link to your blog.
85. Provide Wikipedia articles with links to your blog where it makes sense.
86. Tell people you will link back to them if they review your blog (like John Chow).
87. Join Blog Catalog (kind of like MyBlogLog).
88. Create a MySpace Page. Put your blog on it, and get some friends.
89. Use SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
90. Use good grammar. People will be happy with your writing.
91. Submit your blog to directories in your niche.
92. Email or Instant message your friends to Digg, stumbelupon, etc. your post.
93. Link to your blog from other websites and blogs you own.
94. Write a post about the top x bloggers in your niche or state or country, etc. Then tell them about, so they will want to link back to you.
95. Promote your posts on related newsgroups.
96. Post frequently.
97. Submit your site to free website review sites like coolsiteoftheday.
98. Search for .edu sites with link pages, forums, directories, and wikis to submit your link to.
99. Give out blogging awards and tell the bloggers you are giving the awards to about it.
100. Pray. (Thats just always good advice)
101. Make a 101 list.

BONUS:102. Think outside the box.

Because you had the courage to read down to here, here is another Bonus! The Google Starter Guide to SEO.

Sucess is in your hands,

Yann de Champlain
Work Your SEO
Yann's Personal blog

SEO Missed Opportunities

Yann de Champlain — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:20:59 +0000

Every day we spot missed opportunities online. Often, many of these problems are simple to remedy. Here the top five missed opportunities we come across on a regular basis:

1. Missing or duplicate meta data - Having no meta data or having it simply repeat the brand is an obvious SEO problem that is easy to fix most of the time. The same goes for duplicate meta data - sometimes the developers will repeat the same meta tags throughout the whole website, which the search engines may read as duplicate content, resulting in a failure to rank.

2. Text as images - Content is king online, so dont lock up your text in Flash or as images, no matter how cool it might look. If you dont give the search engines content to crawl you will have a hard time ranking no matter what else you do.

3. No internal linking - A solid internal linking strategy helps your users navigate through your site and it ensures that the search engines crawl and rank your website.

4. Missing or irrelevant alt tags - If you have images on your site, it is a simple matter to ensure that keywords are placed in your alt tags, and it will definitely have a positive effect on your rankings. Also, it helps users who cannot view the images for whatever reason (they are visually impaired, they have a slow connection, or they are using a substandard browser like IE6) understand the content on your site.

5. No robots.txt file - This file tells the search engines what pages of your site should be indexed and what should be ignored. Even if there are no pages on your site that you want to leave out of the search results, this file is still essential as it helps the search engine crawlers determine what to do with your sites pages.

Sucess is in your hands,

Yann de Champlain
Work Your SEO
Yann's Personal blog

20 Great Google Secrets (Don’t tell anyone please)

Yann de Champlain — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:54:08 +0000

Google is clearly the best general-purpose search engine on the Web (see www.pcmag.com/searchengines)

But most people don't use it to its best advantage. Do you just plug in a keyword or two and hope for the best? That may be the quickest way to search, but with more than 3 billion pages in Google's index, it's still a struggle to pare results to a manageable number.

But Google is an remarkably powerful tool that can ease and enhance your Internet exploration. Google's search options go beyond simple keywords, the Web, and even its own programmers. Let's look at some of Google's lesser-known options.

Syntax Search Tricks

Using a special syntax is a way to tell Google that you want to restrict your searches to certain elements or characteristics of Web pages. Google has a fairly complete list of its syntax elements at

Here are some advanced operators that can help narrow down your search results:
www.google.com/help/operators.html

Intitle: at the beginning of a query word or phrase (intitle:"Three Blind Mice") restricts your search results to just the titles of Web pages.

Intext: does the opposite of intitle:, searching only the body text, ignoring titles, links, and so forth. Intext: is perfect when what you're searching for might commonly appear in URLs. If you're looking for the term HTML, for example, and you don't want to get results such as

www.mysite.com/index.html

, you can enter intext:html.

Link: lets you see which pages are linking to your Web page or to another page you're interested in. For example, try typing in

link:http://www.x10media.com

Try using site: (which restricts results to top-level domains) with intitle: to find certain types of pages. For example, get scholarly pages about Mark Twain by searching for intitle:"Mark Twain"site:edu. Experiment with mixing various elements; you'll develop several strategies for finding the stuff you want more effectively. The site: command is very helpful as an alternative to the mediocre search engines built into many sites.

Swiss Army Google

Google has a number of services that can help you accomplish tasks you may never have thought to use Google for. For example, the new calculator feature

(www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator)

lets you do both math and a variety of conversions from the search box. For extra fun, try the query "Answer to life the universe and everything."

Let Google help you figure out whether you've got the right spellingand the right wordfor your search. Enter a misspelled word or phrase into the query box (try "thre blund mise") and Google may suggest a proper spelling. This doesn't always succeed; it works best when the word you're searching for can be found in a dictionary. Once you search for a properly spelled word, look at the results page, which repeats your query. (If you're searching for "three blind mice," underneath the search window will appear a statement such as Searched the web for "three blind mice.") You'll discover that you can click on each word in your search phrase and get a definition from a dictionary.

Suppose you want to contact someone and don't have his phone number handy. Google can help you with that, too. Just enter a name, city, and state. (The city is optional, but you must enter a state.) If a phone number matches the listing, you'll see it at the top of the search results along with a map link to the address. If you'd rather restrict your results, use rphonebook: for residential listings or bphonebook: for business listings. If you'd rather use a search form for business phone listings, try Yellow Search

(www.buzztoolbox.com/google/yellowsearch.shtml).

Extended Googling

Google offers several services that give you a head start in focusing your search. Google Groups

(http://groups.google.com)

indexes literally millions of messages from decades of discussion on Usenet. Google even helps you with your shopping via two tools: Froogle
CODE
(http://froogle.google.com),

which indexes products from online stores, and Google Catalogs
CODE
(http://catalogs.google.com),

which features products from more 6,000 paper catalogs in a searchable index. And this only scratches the surface. You can get a complete list of Google's tools and services at

www.google.com/options/index.html

You're probably used to using Google in your browser. But have you ever thought of using Google outside your browser?

Google Alert

(www.googlealert.com)

monitors your search terms and e-mails you information about new additions to Google's Web index. (Google Alert is not affiliated with Google; it uses Google's Web services API to perform its searches.) If you're more interested in news stories than general Web content, check out the beta version of Google News Alerts

(www.google.com/newsalerts).

This service (which is affiliated with Google) will monitor up to 50 news queries per e-mail address and send you information about news stories that match your query. (Hint: Use the intitle: and source: syntax elements with Google News to limit the number of alerts you get.)

Google on the telephone? Yup. This service is brought to you by the folks at Google Labs

(http://labs.google.com),

a place for experimental Google ideas and features (which may come and go, so what's there at this writing might not be there when you decide to check it out). With Google Voice Search

(http://labs1.google.com/gvs.html),

you dial the Voice Search phone number, speak your keywords, and then click on the indicated link. Every time you say a new search term, the results page will refresh with your new query (you must have JavaScript enabled for this to work). Remember, this service is still in an experimental phase, so don't expect 100 percent success.

In 2002, Google released the Google API (application programming interface), a way for programmers to access Google's search engine results without violating the Google Terms of Service. A lot of people have created useful (and occasionally not-so-useful but interesting) applications not available from Google itself, such as Google Alert. For many applications, you'll need an API key, which is available free from
CODE
www.google.com/apis

. See the figures for two more examples

Thanks to its many different search properties, Google goes far beyond a regular search engine. Give the tricks in this article a try. You'll be amazed at how many different ways Google can improve your Internet searching.

Online Extra: More Google Tips

Here are a few more clever ways to tweak your Google searches.

Search Within a Timeframe

Daterange: (start dateend date). You can restrict your searches to pages that were indexed within a certain time period. Daterange: searches by when Google indexed a page, not when the page itself was created. This operator can help you ensure that results will have fresh content (by using recent dates), or you can use it to avoid a topic's current-news blizzard and concentrate only on older results. Daterange: is actually more useful if you go elsewhere to take advantage of it, because daterange: requires Julian dates, not standard Gregorian dates. You can find converters on the Web (such as

More Google API Applications

Staggernation.com offers three tools based on the Google API. The Google API Web Search by Host (GAWSH) lists the Web hosts of the results for a given query

(www.staggernation.com/gawsh/).

When you click on the triangle next to each host, you get a list of results for that host. The Google API Relation Browsing Outliner (GARBO) is a little more complicated: You enter a URL and choose whether you want pages that related to the URL or linked to the URL

(www.staggernation.com/garbo/).

Click on the triangle next to an URL to get a list of pages linked or related to that particular URL. CapeMail is an e-mail search application that allows you to send an e-mail to google@capeclear.com with the text of your query in the subject line and get the first ten results for that query back. Maybe it's not something you'd do every day, but if your cell phone does e-mail and doesn't do Web browsing, this is a very handy address to know.

Sucess is in your hands,

Yann de Champlain
Work Your SEO
Yann's Personal blog

How Important Are Alt Tags?

Yann de Champlain — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:48:03 +0000

Lets first define what an alt tag is and where you can find them. Alt tags or alternative text are the small text boxes that appear when you hover your mouse over an image or button on a website. They contain descriptive information about that particular image or the destination of the button.

Look at the two examples below. On the left, the mouse is hovering over a button that links to a page described as Free SEO Tool in the alt tag.

Alt tags are mainly used by people who cannot see images on your website. Im sure you remember the dial-up age when websites took what seemed like forever to open, especially the ones with a lot of images. Some browsers had an option to turn images off. This allowed websites to open much faster. In place of the images were alt tags, describing the image that was suppose to be there. Of course dial-up modems have become out-dated and a thing of the past so why are we still using alt tags?

Alt tags are also used in major search engine algorithms. Search engine robots or spiders cannot read images; however they can and do read alt tags. Alt tags help search engines learn more about your website, especially those that lack a lot of content. If used correctly it will even help your website rank higher. Good and descriptive alternative text should be placed on all images, pictures and buttons according to the Design and Content Google Guidelines.

Alt Tag are also used by Google to classify and index the images from your web sites! Of course that is more important for an Desktop Wallpapers Site like anime wallpapers where you got thousands of pics. But even with smaller sites not related to pictures, it can reprensent a good amount of visitors!

Another good reason to use alt tags is accessibility. People with physical disabilities like the blind want to access your website. The buying power of the blind is in the billions and yes, they are frequent web surfers and home Workers!. However, instead of being able to read content on your website its read to them by the computer using a simple application. They cannot see images or buttons on websites so alt tags allow them to get a good description of the image or button. In country or provinces like In Quebec, Canada, this is a requirement form the government on regarding the big web site to make the sites accessible.

So make it a priority, make sure your web design firm uses good, descriptive alt tags on all of your images. A good way to test your website is to simply rollover all your images and look for alt tags. You can also use our Free SEO Tool to determine if youre missing any alt tags.

Sucess is in your hands,

Yann de Champlain
Work Your SEO
Yann's Personal blog

Links of the Week

Yann de Champlain — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:00:33 +0000

Here are five on-page SEO mistakes. You can use this article as a guideline when writing your blog posts to see if you are making the any of these mistakes in your writing.

Indented Google listings - wouldnt it be nice to have your website rank on page #1 not once but twice? Then youd control 20% of the standard SERPs.

Protect your website and your ranking; make sure you are not linking to a bad neighbor.

How to optimize your pay per click campaign - by using these SEO techniques to manage your campaign, you can make sure you make the most of your PPC budget.

This one is just lots of fun to read - since summer is on its way (even though it is still pretty chilly here in Montreal), where our online company is located, its sure taking its time. Have a great weekend everyone!

Sucess is in your hands,

Yann de Champlain
Work Your SEO
Yann's Personal blog