How to Increase Backlinks and Traffic to your Websites

I used to think that the most difficult part of Internet marketing is getting a product or service ready for your client and building a website that they could visit and order from. It has taken me a while to understand that though these are somewhat important the real deal is getting the visitors (traffic) to your site.

If you have expended a lot of time finding the perfect product and building the best website yet no one is visiting your site then what's the use?

You could even get visitors to your site but if they are not clicking on links and ordering products then really all you've been doing is waisting your time. The scope of this article though is to get you working towards achieving a reasonable amount of traffic (visitors) to your site. I shall be writing an additional one about getting your visitors to take action shortly.

There are a lot of web pages about this subject some of them very useful, so I am not going to go into a lot of detail about this. Instead I shall cut to the chase and share the little insights I have learnt that do help from my active blogging months.

• Use relevant keywords and phrases
• Optimize each page
• Provide useful content
• Participate in the Social Media Community
• Build Back-links to your site

If you are able to do these then you will find that your traffic will start to increase and progress will be made in ultimately achieving the goal for which your site was originally set up for.

Lets take these one by one:

Use Relevant Keywords and Phrases

Keywords and phrases are the information we input in the search engine box each time we want to find some information on the net.

If you know what the relevant keywords and phrases are that people are looking for then you will be able to meet their needs by building pages that are rich and optimized for those relevant search terms.

For example if you have a website about Children's toys and you are selling specific Beanie Bears, it may be more expedient for your keywords to be "beanies" maybe even the specific beanie bears names rather than just "Bears", which would be too broad a scope with too many competing webpages which would bring you little or no search engine traffic.

Optimize Each Page.

Once you've decided on what keywords to use make sure that they are included in your meta tags. (This is a html term if you are not familiar with this check out this Basic Html resource.)

Also other things to do is make sure your keywords occur in the first paragraph of your page and highlight it with a bold tag, it should also be found in your last paragraph where you highlight it with an italic tag. Do not over do it and over work your keywords, both the search engines and even more importantly your visitors will see through this and will leave your site without doing anything useful like using or buying your product or service!

Content is King as the saying goes and it's true. Provide your visitors with rich useful information and you will find that they will keep coming back. Write rubbish or copy somebody elses work and you will soon be found out. This will cost you dearly.

Original work, written with care, providing information that will enrich your readers life is what will bring in the credits and help you achieve your goals, whatever they are.

Participate in Social Media Communities

If you've been on the web for any amount of time you would have heard a bit or a lot about Social Media Marketing and Optimization. I am not an expert but I can share again a few things I've learnt.

Apart from the search engines Social Media Sites also known as Web 2.0 communities will bring you rich traffic depending on what your niche is. I find that Internet marketing topics do very well, but that is not to say that other niche's don't.

So how do you participate?

Sign up, explore make friends appreciate other peoples submissions and submit your website and blog.

Now a word of advise. The Web 2.0 communities are not dumping sites. Do not just use them to submit your sites and articles without you participating by digging, stumbling, spinning etc other sites and submitting other peoples sites you find interesting. If you just submit your own sites you will enjoy the initial high visitor numbers if your site is interesting or article is relevant but then a slap on the wrist by the site will lose you lots of visitors in the long run.

Read this article for more information about Social Media Marketing.

Build your own Back-links.

For your site to get top rankings and be taken seriously by the search engines Back-links are very important.

Basically we are talking about other sites linking back to you, becoming a reference point, getting affirmation from other sites that what you have to offer is worth the space on the web.

So how do you build these back-links? Again I am not an expert but these are the things that have worked for me.

• Visiting relevant blogs in my niche making comments and adding my website details when asked during submission
• Writing articles for article directories even Hub-pages, Squidoo's etc. with my site URL links in the Arthur Info Box.
• Building relevant useful tools for my niche websites and submitting them to the appropriate directories.
• Build backlinks to your inner pages as well not just your home page

All these take time and persistence and over the months it builds up and helps increase your back-links, traffic and therefore your authority in your specific niche.

Have you other methods to build backlinks that work for you?