Increase Site Traffic

Google Adwords Traffic

For the majority of site owners, Adwords is not the most beneficial traffic source. Adwords can be costly and usually works best for sites selling goods. Even then, Adwords is usually only cost-effective if the CPC (cost per click) is roughly 1/5th - 1/10th of your product price. For example, imagine you’re selling rubberbands in packs of 20 for $3 and Adwords is charging you 50 cents per click. Assuming every 1 in 5 people clicking the ad is buying your product, you’re making ($3 - 5($.5) = $0.5) 50 cents. Whether or not this is worth it depends on where you are as a business. If you have a good chance of making users come back for return business, or if you have large packs of rubberbands to sell, then chances are you will see a decent profit using Adwords.

Another excellent situation in which to use Adwords is if you’re selling big ticket items. Of course, Adwords will charge more than 50 cents for iPod clicks and significantly more for BMW clicks. Still, if every 1 in 10 people is buying an iPod off you, or every 1 in 500 is buying a BMW you’re easily offsetting the minute Adwords cost.

Text Links

Forgetting the fancy programs, we return to the always classic text links. Text links are an inexpensive way of boosting pagerank and increasing traffic through better search engine rankings. Most text links however, get severely reduced clicks, and you will (generally) see much less direct traffic from a text link ad. There are two kinds of text links, one way links and reciprocative links.

One Way Text Links

One way text links have unbeatable results: a one way link greatly increase pagerank and is a big plus in the eyes of search engines. Your text link is only as good as the site linking to you, so make sure to be careful who you get a link from. You should generally only pay for links from sites with pageranks of 5 and up. In fact, most webmasters can tell you that upon getting a link from a pageranked 5 site, brand news sites are listed on google within 1-3 days, and start seeing increased traffic right away. The beauty of text ads is that you can pay the low cost for one or two months, then simple discontinue them without badly hurting your pagerank or search engine rankings.

Tip: When you get a text link, make sure you pick the anchor text (the text within the a href tags) to be a keyword you want your site to rank high on. It’s also important to change up the anchor text when you get multiple text links.

Free Text Links (Link affiliation)

Two way text links are less effective than one way links, but are helpful nonetheless. Do a quick google search of sites similar to yours and send the webmasters an email asking for a link exchange. Also look for forums where you are allowed to put text links in your signiture and put your site with appropriate anchor text in your sig.

Warning: Acting like a moron spamming your site will get you banned. Most webmasters will let a subtle link go unedited, but will almost always edit out an OBVIOUS LINK. Remember that a link is a link to a google bot, no matter how underdecorated.

Increase Search Engine Traffic

Although it is common knowledge to most site owners, the way your site is optimized will affect your search engine rankings, and will in turn affect the amount of traffic you have comming from search engines. Because serach engine optimization is so huge, I have written that article in the SEO section. See Increase search engine rank.