Is your website getting great traffic? Are pageviews and other metrics improving or stable? How many pages does the average visitor read on your site? If the answers to these questions are negative, you need to find ways to boost page views and increase website traffic immediately.

More pageviews means more opportunity to advertise products & services.

There are a few ways you can improve your website’s pageviews. These tips are not blackhat or unethical in anyway. They’re simple solutions that become force multipliers.

With the expense and time involved in driving raw visitors to your site, you need fixes and updates that can be done once and allow your site to capitalize on it’s user base overtime.

Increases in page views can greatly increase income or even jump start earnings where there weren’t any. What usually stimulates multiple page views is relevancy. The more specific and targeted a website, or section of a website is, the more likely there will be a click on a similar page. It’s instinctive and impulsive for highly related pages to have an appeal to users.

Interlinking, popular pages and related pages

Always link to other pages within the body of your content. If this is a blog or article type site, and the site is highly targeted, there will be plenty of opportunity to link to related pages within the paragraphs. This is called interlinking and is pretty much common practice among the pros.

Related pages can be displayed just below the article or somewhere close to the main content of the page. These pages must be similar in topic to the current page’s content but with a slightly different focus. This will take advantage of users who are generally interested in the broader topic.

Popular pages, especially for article sites, can be displayed on a sidebar or footer area. This is a great way to drive hits to already successful pages. I would recommend having a tabbed box on the sidebar with one tab for popular pages and another for Editor favorites. This is great for promoting pages with lower page views. If it’s a simple corporate site, then a main nav is a must on all pages.

If there is sparse opportunity for interlinking, try displaying small summaries of current pages on the sidebar, footer or header areas with a link to read more. This will work great for services, testimonials and other rich content pages.

RSS Feeds & Other Syndication Channels

To draw the user back to your site, display a synopsis of articles in RSS feeds and make the user click to view the full article on your site. This is not recommended if you are tracking RSS views and have RSS ads.

When syndicating entire articles, making sure the links within the body has an absolute URL. This means that the entire domain is included in the link. If this is not in place, then links will point to the current syndication site or simply be dead.

Other types of syndication includes content scrapers, article directories, product databases, etc. The main thing here is making sure your inner article links are in place and pointing to your site. You also want to make sure that there is proper attribution with a link back to your home page.

Member Profiles, Author Profile and About Page

Your site may have a good amount of steady users and participators. Require membership for social interactions and give a profile with a backlink as a benefit. This allows you to get additional content for your site that’s user driven. This will greatly increase page views.

The same for Authors, if there is more than one author, allow profiles and make them public. As for the About page, that’s like the profile for the website. Create a great about page. You will be surprised that a large portion of users read the about page intently. Use it to highlight content, and link to that content.

Categories List, Archives and Search Form

3 of the most powerful ways to increase pageviews is with an easy to access categories list, archives list and a search form. These make it easy for users to find the content they’re interested in, thereby increasing site traffic.

A categories list is the lazy mans search. All content is neatly arranged and users can find something their interested in within seconds. Place this on the side bar or a separate page for maximum effect. Usually blogs will have a link to the category the post is in. Utilize this built in feature to increase hits to that category.

Take it a step further and provide an archives list that’s well presented, and arranged by date. This will compliment the categories list and drive pageviews up. Put the archives on the sidebar or a separate page like the categories.

Another very useful item is a search form (and technology to accompany). Most blog software have search technology built in. Utilize this to satisfy users with immediate needs. The search form should be clearly visible and provide a clean, easy to read list of results.

Social postings, Sharing, Emailing a Friend

Use Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to spread the word about your business. Post about every new article or page on twitter. Chat about casual related information and offer promotions on Facebook.
Use share and like buttons. Every time someone clicks one of those buttons, there entire friends list can see a post about your page. This also applies to email a friend buttons. People love sharing content, encourage them to.

Conclusion

There are many ways to boost pageviews without spending more time or money driving raw hits. Provide links to other content and especially if it’s related to the content the user is reading. Syndicate your content and let other websites promote your pages.

Make sure to add links to older pages, popular pages and user profiles. Also social buttons and interactions will increase website traffic because this is part of the search algorithm now.

5 Ways to Increase Website Traffic by Boosting Pageviews is a post from: WebDevStar.com | © WebDevStar.com

There are only so many things we have control over. Algorithmic updates is one of those things. But what about ON PAGE SEO?

There are people who work very hard to solidify standards that even the Search Engines must adhere to. Of course standards may only be enforced if there is true habituation by the masses.

What is costing  you thousands of dollars every year.

Missing Sitemap

Your Website might have many pages with plenty of text content. If you’re still not receiving significant traffic, then perhaps your site is not properly indexed by Search Engines.

This could be caused by bad site navigation structure, lack of a sitemap, and of course, no Webmaster Tools account. You are losing thousands of visitors every year that goes by. And meanwhile you remain profitless from your website.

The Language of robots

There seems to be a miss-conception about content on the web. Some people really think only humans read this stuff. Don’t you realize how many robots actually live among us? They visit us every day in some cases. And their numbers are growing.

The problem at the moment is that robots don’t speak our exact language. While we may be able to title a book or article without even mentioning the main terms of the content, and still have a human understand it from just the title, a robot will probably give it a lower relevancy than what it actually is.

Now that I’ve mentioned that, not using relevant keywords in your titles is costing you big bucks. Not using the same keyword or keywords used in the title through out the body of the webpage is also hurting it’s ranking potential. Your pages are ranking much lower than they could and you are missing all the great traffic.

Their just NOT walking into the store

In many cases you have a hot ranking on page one on a highly trafficked word, but the hits are not coming as you expect. Have you even considered what your SERP  (Search Engine Results Page)  listing looks like.

There are paid advertisements above and on the right side of the search engine results page. These are thought of as ads of course, but you should also think of a natural listing as an ad as well. And the site just below your site, may be well aware of that and craft a well defined ad for that space. Now you are losing hits and sales to them.

Conclusion

It takes only a few changes in the way you run your website that will make the difference in how much visitors you get. The things mentioned above are enough to get your pages ranked on many relevant keywords. Your site is fully capable of making a lot more money if it’s currently making any.  But ignoring the items above might very well be costing you.

The cost of ignoring On-page SEO is a post from: WebDevStar.com | © WebDevStar.com

I’ve made thousands of dollars from leads generated by CraigsList Ads. At first I didn’t care how much views my ads received. I only cared about who called me or click on my website’s link because I can easily monitor that.

With a bad economy, it became harder to generate the same amount of leads. My income basically took a hit.

This is the point where conversion optimization becomes important. I knew the leads were still coming from classified ads. But I needed a way to determine how competitive my ad’s title was compared to others. Because this is what people saw before they decided to click through to see the full ad.

With this information I could tweak my titles. And even tweak my ad copy to achieve a higher conversion rate.

CraigsList does not allow tracking of ads in most of its sections. In fact I’ve only tracked ads in the services section. So if you try the method I’m about to give you in other sections, be prepared to have it pulled. The method I use have not caused any red flags to go up (yet).

To do this, go to StatCounter.com and sign up for a free account.

Then create a new project. When you view the project details, there will be a Rench icon, click on that. Then click install code. Select invisible counter. At this point it’s important to check off “HTML Only Counter”. This is important because CL does not allow JavaScript in their ads.

Go ahead and complete the tracker creation process. You will get a piece of code that is an image enclosed by a link tag. You can extract just the img part of this snippet because that’s all you need.

It will look like this : <img src=”http://c.statcounter.com/4697119/0/f98546e2/1/” alt=”vBulletin counter” border=”0″>

Please do not use the code above…it probably won’t work for you.

Now go ahead and paste this on the bottom of your ad.

Please note; Because this will now report that your ad has an image, if you do not add your own image, then it will be seen as deceptive when some one views the ad and see no image. Add an image to make it legit.

Within minuets of posting, you should start seeing total views and unique hits on your ad. If it works fine, you will see 1 hit. This is you, because you should have previewed the ad before submitting.

Let me know if this was helpful. I’ve been using this for a few months now and it has working fine for me.

How to Track Views on Craigs List Ads is a post from: WebDevStar.com | © WebDevStar.com

Make no mistake about it; These Online Marketing Strategies will be around for quiet a while. I’ve realized the potential for old and new avenues of promotion. I’ll cover some of the best options in this short, but sweet list.

1. Your own Affiliate Program. The reason this is number one IMO, is because almost all the other techniques bellow, your affiliates can do for you. Which will be hundreds or thousands of times more than you can do if you executed on these your self. Even if you have a third party company like ClickBank or Commission Junction handle the management and deployment of it, you still stand to make allot more and faster.

2. Post Publishing. This includes Article Marketing, Social Media Marketing with Posts, Web Site Pages, Affiliate Marketing, Search Engine Marketing and more…all in one. Why? It’s the content. No matter how long or short. To post any kind of content, weather it be text, video, images, or audio…it’s all about publishing.

3. Pay Per Click/Pay Per Impression. This is on its own for obvious reasons, you have to open your wallets. It doesn’t matter if you try Adwords, Social Media Ads, or even Mobile Ads. Simply put, you pay to have your ads displayed and/or clicked on.

4. Email Marketing. Still people rely on this primitive messaging system. But for whatever reason, sending emails to people who want them ( with good content of course) is a great way to market your products or services.

5. Link Acquisition. Even though the above methods create links for a website, often you will have to go get the one way do follow links from reputable and relative websites. That might mean engaging site owners by phone and email. Not 100% an online method. But all the referrals are from the internet. This helps in search engines and visits from the sites providing the link back to yours.

6. Classified Ads. With the success of CraigsList, it’s easy to see why placing free ads on classified sites will get you good targeted traffic. I do this and it does converts sales.

7. Free Applications. Not at all like Post marketing. This is software applications, games, plugins and tools that are given away as free to use. It’s tricky, but if you can display ads to your free users, its a great technique to generate leads and sales.

This is an over arching list that includes all the finer nitty gritty work. I feel this allows a better understanding of what it takes to market your website online. If you have any comments or questions about this list please leave your input bellow.

Top 7 Online Marketing Techniques is a post from: WebDevStar.com | © WebDevStar.com

What a common Internet Business Promoter has to offer.

Internet Business Promoters often offer tons of visitor traffic to your website. Guarantee placement in the top of organic search results. They often boast of industry leading techniques that are exclusive. Claims they have/are experts with more than a decade of experience. And even claim they can beat any of your competition. All this in less than a week. And of course with big returns on investment.

There seems to be some fluff. Where is it?

What the promoters are selling is fine, but there’s fluff somewhere. The fluff is what they would like to offer, and not what is actually delivered. They make ridiculous claims that can’t be backed up. Let me make this clear; No one person or company can guarantee top natural ranking on Google. Large amounts of traffic in a short amount of time is not an every day event unless it’s truly targeted and viral.

The down side is the wasting of bandwidth and other resources for little turnover on visitors who’re not interested. It takes significantly more time than two weeks to get any kind of organic placement on Google and other search engines. And if your domain is brand new, forget about an Alexa ranking until it hits 6 months old.

There’s also this claim they can beat any competition in a very short time frame. Yes the internet levels the playing field, but the competition is usually a step ahead. New ventures in most cases have to work for months and even years to attain what they have. More often than not, they fail. This is true online as it is offline.

The experienced internet promoter of 5 years ago has little to offer from those years. Change happens fast and often. The methods and techniques are not the same. As the internet is not the same.

Facing the real Internet Business Promoter

When you meet the real Internet Business Promoter, you will not notice at first. No bells will go off. No warning signs will flash. Because, the service offered will sound the same as any other. This is where it becomes tricky. One way to know is by watching the ROI. The return on investment is one way to judge the true effectiveness of an Ad campaign. This takes patience. Also there will be down turns in the return. At these times, strategy and organization is the key to staying the course.

The real internet promoter will drive mostly interested customers your way. They understand that every visitor is a chance for a turnover. They will rarely spend time pursuing random referrals and place priority on those that are targeted.

Strategy on attaining some of the most talented.

To find the right company or individual to conduct your promotions in a modern market is not exactly easy. Many business promoters rely on out-dated methods, or simply focus too much on offline promotions. The one you are looking for is someone with technical experience in website development, online content preparation skills, keyword research and analysis experience. This person must be familiar with all the most highly trafficked websites. And be able to prepare text, image or video ads (content) for these various websites.

The real Internet Business Promoter will interview you.

The real Internet Business Promoter will not take a chance on a company, product or service they know will fail. The promoter with a good eye for winning business plans will ask questions to determine the possibility of success. They will seem like an investigator, there to find out what you are doing, rather than rushing to take the job. When they are satisfied that you can most likely achieve a positive ROI, only then will they want you as a client. Therefore an interview is actually an evaluation on the part of the Promoter of you and your business.

Some flexibility and versatility will be required for success.

Technology is often evolving. Morphing into partial representations of the original applications. The methods applied will often have to be revisited and revised. With these ever changing landscapes, a business can be up or down. Flexibility and versatility in your Marketing will allow you to better position your business in-front of internet users who are interested.

Conclusion.

In the end, when your advertising dollars are spent. If the gross earnings is not handsomely more than the initial investment, and even after thorough review by your Marketing people, then you must consider looking for the real Internet Business Promoter. The one who is always up-to-date with the latest ways to promote a business.

The real Internet Business Promoter & separating Pros from Cons is a post from: WebDevStar.com | © WebDevStar.com

A brief explanation of how search engines work today

Search engines today are dumb. I know this is not politically correct. But why do I say that? I say this because, face it, most searches do not return exactly what you want. They offer a bunch of related content, that’s usually not on target. We often have to refine and re-enter our search. Search engines use a number of factors to rank websites, in many cases this method fails. This is partly the fault of the user and the search engine. The user often enters vague keywords that the search engines cannot properly interpret. Search engine do not handle this issue gracefully.

What is the problem with the current model?

The problem is Search Engines do not know what a user means in many cases. The search engines are now experimenting with live suggestions to help the process. But this method must be more intelligent. Another problem is search engines don’t always rank sites based on relevance to search. But try to make a guess at what is really expected from the request, and offer the best based on their very imperfect ranking methods.

A few ideas that might come to the rescue

There are a number of research projects currently trying to tackle this issue. For example XFN (XHTML Friends Network). Using hyperlinks we are able to represent human relationships. Website owners can state who they are linking to and how they know that person or site. Also FOAF (The Friend of a Friend), with their method we are able to do similar relationship declarations as XFN, but with more control over information. With more access to deeper attributes and connections of each relationship. There is also Hakia. This is a Semantic Search Engine. Their method is based on the idea of more credibility than popularity. They use librarians to judge the content among other factors. These are just three examples of the next generation of technology that will make search engines just a little more intelligent.

How these can be implemented

Implementing some of these new technologies might not be so practical. For one, there needs to be far more options available through XFN and FOAF. The Hakia search engine uses humans, and this might not be easy to scale. There are other projects that might prove more reliable than presented here. But currently no one person or company has made significant strides to building some thing remotely as smart as a child.

How will the future of search engines look

The future of search might prove to be revolutionary. With the right information probably being instantly available to us in a streamlined and natural way. For example, we speak our search and have the request taken by our in house computer system, and then give us the answer in voice, video text or any number of other formats. This would of course be highly intelligent and would return only the most relevant and credible results.

Conclusion
The search engines are not smart enough. Their ranking methods are faulty and need serious upgrading. There are technology being researched and developed that might help. There exists the problem of scaling because the amount of information required cannot be handled effectively at the moment. In the future, search will be radically more intelligent. They will give almost perfect answers to our questions, instantly and in any format we desire.

Why are Search Engines so Dumb? is a post from: WebDevStar.com | © WebDevStar.com