Website Maker Tips Even If You Are A Beginner » Website Traffic

Forum Marketing: 5 Tips How to Maximize Forum Activity

Joshua Elliot — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:24:28 +0000

If you are looking for ways on how to increase the activity of your forum, then you have come at the right place in the web. This article will provide you what you’re looking for. Here’s what you need to do to maximize forum activity.

1. Utilize mass email feature in your forum –. Mass email feature is provided by most forum hosts nowadays which you can make use of in order to increase the activity of your forum. This enables the board owner to communicate with its member through email notifications. Unfortunately, this is often overlooked by many board owners, without knowing its great advantage. By notifying your forum members about upcoming plans or events using this mass email feature regularly, they will be able to know that you’re still active.

2. Keep posting – Remember, forum’s bloodline is its post. If you stop posting in your forum just because no one else is willing to post, chances are it would fail and will become inactive permanently. Create as many topics as you can that you think will entice other members to post in your board. Make them relevant and interesting. As you do this, don’t be discouraged just because your members are not posting yet. The more you post, the higher your chance to encourage them to post as well, so keep posting.

3. Create a Contest – one great way to increase activity of your forum is through a contest. People love competition and all you have to do is to offer one. You just have to make sure that your members will be interested to join and participate to that contest. Make it suitable to your forum’s style and niche. Let’s say for example your forum’s niche is about graphics, host a contest that is related to graphics. Don’t be discouraged if the contest you have created did not “click”. You can create one after another until you come up with the one that will surely encourage your members to join. You can even ask your members what they would like to compete about.

4. Promote your forum effectively – In order to achieve maximized forum activity, you have to gain more people or members to post in your forum. How will you be able to attract more members if you cannot make your forum visible to them? Of course, as board owner, you have to do your job effectively. That is to advertise your forum very well. Make your forum visible to your target niche. This doesn’t mean that you have to invest huge amount of money in advertising. Fortunately, many search engines, directories and forums that allow board owners to plug their forums onto their databases. All you have to do is to plug your forums on their databases to acquire more potential members.

5. Reward your “Active Poster” Members – this is a great way to motivate your members especially new ones to post in your forum. Create a few tiers of rewards. Let’s say, you will offer a reward for someone that will be able reach certain number of posts within the given period, let’s say weekly or monthly. In this strategy, you will be able to accomplish two targets: Encourage your members to become an active poster and maximize your forum activity.

Link Building: Find Out the Benefits of Link building to your Website

Joshua Elliot — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:40:23 +0000

Backlinks are simply hyperlinks published on various websites that lead back to your site. Having backlinks offer many advantages to your personal site. While there are many SEO experts that offer information on the best methods of gaining different kinds of links its helpful to understand what they are and how they are used.

By using backlinks you can increase the ranking for your site. A direct correlation can be found between the page rank of a site and amount of inbound links that point to that site. Users need to remember the different between a website and web page too. While a web page is just one page with only one URL that is used for linking, a website contains several pages that each need links to gain the same page rank. For instance the main URL of a site might be ranked in the top 10, but the inner pages might not be ranked at all.

These links will also help to increase the amount of traffic that a website has. The increased page rank created an increase in the organic traffic and often helps to provide a steady source of potential profits. Also, the higher a search engine ranks your site, the more traffic it will have.

Bots are used by computers to index and rank individual websites. One of the things they take into account is the trust other websites show towards yours. When a site is willing to link to yours without reciprocal link, it assumes you must have some information that others are willing to share. The more a bot sees this happen they higher page rank it will give.

These links also help to increase the amount of money that a site can generate. Using sites to generate income is helping the Internet to grow by millions of websites a week. The more links to your site the greater your chances of turning a profit are.

The Internet is connected by a spider web of hyperlinks and there is room to build your site into the booming traffic gem you desire. The more popular a site, the higher the page rank, the higher the page rank the more traffic. The increase in traffic means there are more customers looking to your products or services.

The most important thing to remember in any website is that content is king. As you add more content you need to remember to add more backlinks that will start the linking cycle all over again.

Link Building 101: Utilize Relevant and Descriptive Anchor text to increase Link Popularity

Joshua Elliot — Sun, 23 May 2010 16:09:37 +0000

To be able to have a consistent progress on your web ranking, you have to enhance your link popularity—meaning you have to generate lots of valuable links that will back link to your website. Utilizing anchor text to link to your site gives higher degree of enhancement to your site’s popularity compared to a typical link, but you must vary it to take advantage of its efficiency.

Now the questions are: What kind of links should you use? Where are you going to get your links? How frequently should you vary your anchor text?

The Internal links

Ascertain that every page in your website links to one page to another. Build a website layout and directory of your web pages. In the “description” of your link, you can utilize internal anchor text so that if Google visit your website the entire site will be easily seen using your website layout or map.

Getting a quality page rank through blogging isn’t that easy because they usually do not have backlinks. The best way to have good page rank is to make use of anchor text in similar posts which will also improve your link popularity.

For E.g.:

If your webpage is all about leather bags and wallet, your anchor text there have “leather bags and wallet” link in it. The anchor text should be descriptive and relevant to your site.

The External links

Anchor text in external sites improves page rank and link popularity. In giving a link offer the exact html code to be inserted on the webpage, it will help the site’s visitors to find the page easily.

How frequently should you vary your anchor text?

When you use the same anchor text, for example in 50 web pages, it may be mistakenly viewed as a spam. Therefore, you have to vary your anchor text/or the address of your web page so that it would be mixed up.

For E.g.:

As a replacement to using “leather bags and wallet” as your hyperlink, use “affordable leather bags, trendy wallets and bags, etc”. The phrase is not the same but the “leather bags and wallet” is still there. You will not link to the same “leather bags and wallet” page; rather you link it to interrelated page. And this will aid in building up the link popularity and structure to your site.

Where are you going to get your links?

Utilizing Yahoo Explorer check your backlink on top ten sites on your niche. Search for sites which will enable you to add your website links.
Make an article(s) on niche, and vary your anchor text at the end of your articles in resource box.
Submit website to specific and broad directories.
Put a hyperlink in your comment when you visit linked forums and blogs.
Obtain hyperlinks from public sites like Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, etc…

Utilize anchor text when you want to build your link, this will improve your link popularity as well as your page ranking, plus, you will build greater web traffic.

Alexa Ranking Important? Or SEO Important?

Joshua Elliot — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:00:02 +0000

I was reading ProBlogger’ latest post on “How to boost your Alexa Ranking” written by a guest Kelly Diels. She was sharing on how it got her blog went from 1,082,076 to 173,556 in Alexa ranking in 2 months and 1 day, which is quite great if that is your goal.

The post was giving tips in Alexa ranking, and I find it very good to read and informative. But one though got to me while I was reading it. Is Alexa ranking or important than SEO?

This is quite hard to tell which is more important……

Why I said what I said

I find that Alexa and SEO have something related to each other, that is why so many so the Internet marketers uses both of them to brand or boost about themselves. This is okay, I sometimes do that too. But the real question comes if your high ranking Alexa number brings you a lot of traffic to your website?

From what I see in the blog post, Alexa ranking is mostly about creating new unique content, getting authoritative links back to your website, and to create content often. This is very close to SEO ideas, and basically are basic SEO too.

In order to have the both Alexa and SEO ranking, I would suggest to do a very good on page optimization on every page on your website when you have new content. Here keyword research is key to building SEO content. It is important to find out the related keywords that

Then use the tips given by Kelly, to write unique content, guest post and link back to your website or blog, and lastly to write more content often.

For me SEO is still important, follow by Alexa ranking. What about you? Which is more important to you? I like to hear from you.

Facebook May Be Killing You Instead

Joshua Elliot — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:02:06 +0000

Recently, Facebook has been used as a tool to dig up stuff about people who are very likely to be investigated, and you may be one of them too. Though Facebook was initially used as a tool to find lose or old friends, or even make new friends, but it has now changed.

Facebook has now turned into a tool to explore on anyone that someone is interested in. Just less than a month ago, someone in the western country was who was taking monthly cash from a insurance company as she was in a depress state, then the insurance company decided to do a check on her, and found out that she frequently went to clubs to enjoy herself. Making this a reason for the insurance company not to pay the monthly money to her.

Today, I saw that it was now used in other different areas of investigation, like extramarital affairs (to find out who the third person is, and to gather evident), like stalkers, etc….

You might be asking how can I use Facebook again!!!

You can still continue to use Facebook as a way of means to communicate with your friends, as Facebook was created to be a social network tool. The thing is not to post words or photos that will not jeopardize yourself or your property. I have seem people used Facebook as a diary or journal telling everybody what they did, what they felt, what happened to them etc…

The thing is not to tell everybody your secret in Facebook or anywhere online.

Ya, it seems that people are stupid at times and telling everybody their problem, trying to get some sympathy replies in return. What they did not realize is that people judge what you put out there (on the Facebook).

Facebook privacy settings are very flexible and easy to change as well, here is a post on the 10 New Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know. Its great to prevent yourself or even decrease the chances of you being targeted of these bad news.

What I like to comment and I may be wrong, that not all people are the same, and they do not share the same values as you do. So I would recommend that you share with a friend face to face instead on Facebook. This way you can be sure that only a few knew about your situation and would advise you on solutions.

Facebook is still used for social network with friends, all you need to do is to be wise and smart in what you want to say or comment. I still like to use Facebook, because of Facebook applications, its friendly and yet easy to use tools. What do you say that we should do with Facebook in the near future? I like to hear about it.

Attracting More Website Traffic By Being Human

Joshua Elliot — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:21:59 +0000

How can we attract more traffic in the search engines, and yet be able to rank well in the search engines? To answer the question above, is to be human, to be precise is to write like a human.

A lot of Internet marketers made a very fatal mistake of writing for the search engines, instead of human eyes. The search engines are meant for us human to find information, to solve our problems, to gain knowledge, to find a service, etc…

Getting free website traffic from the search engines can be quite easy, what you need is some basic on page SEO knowledge that will position your web page to the top 10 search result. And you have to write for human eyes not for search engines.

Here are some ways on how to increase website traffic by being human:

Write your content like you are writing a letter to a friend – Yes, a letter to someone is so close to the heart. It will capture the attention of your readers, telling them your experience, engaging them to your world. This way it will keep them staying longer, because they read the whole content or letter you wrote.

You will need to ask them engaging questions like what, why, how and when. This way it will get your readers to think and continue to read more, and finally to what you have to offer.

Keyword Research To Get More Website Traffic – Finding out what are the keywords people are searching online can help you find free traffic. As long as you write relevant content and adding keywords that are related to your content, your search engine result for your web page will increase if you position your keywords on your web page.

Inter-linking between web pages that are relevant to each other will help to boost your ranking as well. So long that it helps to get free website traffic increased, this is a effort that must be done properly. Using a keyword research tool is very important, as it will determine your success.

Free Website Traffic via Forum Marketing – A lot of people will go to a forum asking people help. So you can get there to build your traffic over there. For forum marketing, it is all about consistency. You can choose to answer a solution or start a tread, no matter what you do, you must have a plan to show your consistency, like every week I will post 20 treads or answer enquiries 20 times.

Which will get more traffic to your website? Post a tread or answer a post? It depends on how your strategy is, if your website is all about solving a particular problem, I would recommend to answer more questions and starting a tread by sharing a tip or news or share your experiences.

Forum marketing will also build your name in the Internet, making them want to find out more about you.

There are other ways by being more human, and I like to pass to anyone who would like to share your experience and results. Do share on the comment box below. I will be listening…..

Negative Keywords: The Most Underused Keyword Type In Google Adwords

Joshua Elliot — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:47:40 +0000

Negative keywords can help you take away un-targeted traffic that most properly will not buy or even subscribe from you. And I must say that most of the people who uses Google Adwords do not know how negative keywords can help them in generating targeted traffic to your site.

What does Negative Keywords do?

Negative keywords help to take away unwanted keywords that are not relevant or related to your website. Thus helping you to increase in Click Through Rate, and conversion to sales or even lead generating.

Negative keywords also help to reduce your cost per click, and thus with better conversion, better click through will result in better Quality Score in your Adwords campagin.

To help you understand better how negative keywords can help you in your PPC, I used a pizza as illustration (I like pizza, hahaha).

Its looks good, isn’t it? Well back to our illustration. Most of the time people will choose to eat only parts of the pizza, like maybe the crust only, some like to eat the cheese etc…

What negative keywords is to take away the parts that you do not want to eat, and leaving you the parts you only want to eat. Sounds good?

As a lot of people may type in the market you are in, but not the niche you are targeting, making your site not targeted and thus resulting in decrease in conversion.

Your Google Adwords account can help you research negative keywords of your niche, first go to ‘Opportunities’, under ‘Tools’, you will find ‘Keyword Tools’. What you need to do is to key in the primary keywords of your niche, choose the which country you are targeting, if you are targeting the whole world, choose ‘All countries and Territories’, and click “Get Keywords Results”.

The keyword tool will generate other related keywords for you to add into your account. To find out the negative keywords, you need to change the ‘Match Type’ to ‘Negative’. This way you will be able have ideas whether to add in the negative keywords.

The negative keywords generated from the keyword tool may not suit as negative keywords, so you will need to do a quick thinking whether this keyword is good to use for your niche.

Since I started to use negative keywords (a year after my Adwords journey), everything has turn for the better for me. Increase in click through, decrease in impression, decrease in cost per click, increase in quality score for the keywords too.

If you have been using Adwords, but not using the negative keywords. You are missing out a lot fun, and you are paying a lot for unwanted clicks too. Using the negative keywords is easy. As now you can specify the negative keywords in not just broad phrase (in the past only), now you can use exact match as well as phrase match too. Going deeper into the words you do not want.

If you have heard that those people using Adwords, and not having result they want, most properly it’s because they did not use the negative keywords to filter away the unwanted keywords.

Now, I like to hear from your experience in using Adwords to drive traffic, I will be listening to you, I promise.

Netbooks Are Making SEO Ranking More Competitive

Joshua Elliot — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:35:31 +0000

Netbooks are the newest mini laptops that are on the trend now, and most of them are owed by females, and males are not the majority of the netbook owners. It was only recently that I used my friend’s netbook to search something on Google, that I realised the search result rankings is going to be harder if the computers are going to be smaller.

The netbook is surprising cheaper than the average 14inch laptops, smaller, although the operating system is not faster than their bigger cousins, what they lack in speed, they make up in their portability and affordability. Back to what I want to voice out is that we as Internet marketers will face a more competition for search engine rankings, here is the reason why:

As the netbooks are usually 10 inch in size, that makes the screen smaller and thus when doing a search online, less search results will appear on the netbook screen. Below is the picture from my friend’s netbook:

As you can see that the search results are showing 2 natural results, whereas the paid search (Adwords PPC) has occupied 3 top positions on the result. Below is the search result of a 14 inch laptop, where I am using the same keyword search of ‘forex training’ and we can see that there are 3 PPC ads on top follow by 3 natural searches:

It has been known that when searchers are searching on the results, they will tend to focus on the top few results instead of the bottom few, refer to the picture below

Why would searchers not look further down for more results? Here are some of my thoughts why:

1) They are too lazy: yes they simply are too lazy to scroll down to check for more.

2) They have found what they are looking for, so they simply ignore the other search results.

Back to the topic on why netbooks are making SEO ranking more competitive. Due to the small screen and my two thoughts why the searchers did not look further, it becomes clear that search engine ranking is getting more and more competitive.

The women are buying the netbooks, due to its small size and weight less. So for the women niches are the ones that will make the SEO ranking the most competitive as women are buyers, who is unlike men. We know that most women are buyers, thus the women niches will be getting competitive than ever.

Well the good news is that there will still be people wants to own a laptop that has bigger screen than a netbook (for mostly men and lesser women). The main thing is to focus more on your website keyword research, related content, placing keywords on your web page for on page optimization and generating relevant links back to website. Will help to rank your web page in higher search result rankings.

By the way, if you have something to add on, do feel free to comment below. And if you find that this post is useful to you, do buzz this post up using the Yahoo Buzz button above.

How To Get Good Quality Score In Google Adwords

Joshua Elliot — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:51:32 +0000

If you have been using Google Adwords driving traffic to website or landing page, you would understand that it is very important to get a good quality score in your PPC campaign. Here are some reasons why getting a good quality score is important:

Reason 1: Lowering cost per click

Perhaps the most important reason why getting a good quality score is important. It’s about money, actually getting your marketing cost lowered. In a way, you can get the cost per click as low as 10% of your Max Cost Per Click (MaxCPC), that is something worth knowing about. Lets do some math here, MaxCPC is $1, average click through for the PPC campaign is 100 per month, that means your PPC marketing cost is $100 per month. Now you have good quality score, assuming average cost per click is $0.50 for one month with average 100 clicks per month, the PPC cost now is $50. You now have save $50. Remember that in a business where you are always cutting cost.

Reason 2: Increase Ad position Automatically

A strange thing happen here when you have good quality score and good record of your PPC campaign, the PPC ad position will move upwards, meaning instead of your Ad in position 5, it now becomes position 3. Let me explain the importance here, the higher your position is the more your MaxCPC must be when first start. So with the help of your good track record (good quality score), you are able to rank high in the PPC Ad ranks.

How to get a good quality score can be quite easy, it will require time and effort on your part. A high Click Through Rate (CTR) and Landing Page relevancy are very important aspect of how your quality score is given. Read Attracting More Clicks In Your PPC Ads and 10 Secrets To A Successful Landing Page for more info.

Quality score has the range from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest. If you have 1 to 4 its consider bad, 5 to 6 is normal, 7 to 9 is good, and 10 is great. Quality score is calculated on keyword level, so you can see your quality score in this way (4/10 or 6/10 or 10/10). Getting 10 out of 10 is not hard, but just a lot of hard work.

You will need to if possible use exact match in the process, the ad to have the keywords, and the landing page as well. In order to make sure you have the highest possible quality score for each keyword is to have specific keywords (almost the same) in the same ad group, with specific ads (with keywords in it), and keywords in the H1 of landing page. I can assure you that even if you did not have quality score of 10, you would still get 7 and above using the above method. If you are interested to find out how quality score is calculated, read here.

And if you realized that getting a high quality score is all about relevancy, which is by the way Google’s moto, to provide relevant search results to the online users.

If you have any thing to add in, feel free to share on the comment, and if you find this post is helping you do Yahoo Buzz for me above, or share it to via social bookmarking sites below. Hear from you soon.