PlanetB

This is the first article in a series about website traffic generation techniques.

If you’re reading this, you are probably well aware that backlinks are one of the best techniques to increase traffic to your website. The more links from other websites to yours, the higher Google (or other search engines) will rank your website. Also, if your link is strategically placed, people will click on it. Fortunately many (if not all) of ways to create backlinks to your website are completely free (speaking in financial terms, of course – it does take lots of time and effort). In this first part of my traffic generation article series, I’m going to cover a few key ways to create backlinks to your website.

Blog Comments

Making comments on blogs was at one point a great way to create massive numbers of backlinks that search engines like Google would see and therfore increase your google rating. Simply make a bunch of comment posts on various websites and include your link (without being overly spamy). However, most blogging applications these days (like WordPress) tag links embedded in comments with the “nofollow” attribute and as such, most comment links will do relatively nothing to increase your search ranking. There are blogs out there, however, that do not include the “nofollow” attribute on comment links.
Here’s the approach that I use to find quality blogs that don’t have “nofollow” links on their comments: First find a competing website.

The easiest way to do this is to simply search for your keywords in Google and pick off the top few sites. I find it best to use blogsearch.google.com so that your results are all blogs. The sites at or near the top of the list will have many backlinks to them. Use an application like Open Link Explorer from seomoz.org to see what kind of backlinks exist for those sites. If you’re looking to compete in search rankings with top sites, you need to aim for a similar number of backlinks from similar quality sites.

Links in comments aren’t only good for SEO. Strategically placing links in comments on targeted pages that have high volumes of traffec will get you lots of direct traffic as well. It’s amazing how much traffic I see from other blogs simply because of this reason – people see my comment in a post on some other site and then click on my link and end up on my site. The key is to be subtle however. You don’t want the blog owner to see a blatant marketing attempt and delete your comment. The best links tend to be from related content as well. So if I write a blog post on my site about interval training, for example, I’d make sure to comment on blog articles covering the same topic. “Hey, great article! I have trouble keeping track of interval sprints too. I have to agree that they are fantastic for metabolic training. There’s a great interval timer available for your iPhone at…”

Another suggestion with respect to commenting on other blogs to increase traffic – use an form auto fill plugin on your web browser. I use Firefox and the “Autofill Forms” addon. You can create profiles and define specific rules for them. So if I’m commenting on sites for iPad backgrounds and want to backlink to my iPad backgrounds website, I have a profile ready to go with some pre-written content for the comment text area and my link, name and contact info for those fields. Click the autofill button and 90% of the comment is done.

Forum Posts

Forum posts are virtually the same tactic as making blog comments. Typically for any topic you write about, there will be forums already available online, where people regularly go and read and contribute to. I find that if I place a bunch of posts strategically on these forums, with decent comments (again without being spammy), I can get a load of visitors from the forums and typically the links are follow links which are a bonus for search engine ranking.

The key is to find forums that have topics related to your website which also allow hyper-links in your signature. Register and create a profile on the forum. Use a good avatar. This is huge! If you use a default avatar, people are more likely to skip your post – you lose possible readers and possible conversions. You also want an avatar that is interesting, which will increase the attractiveness of your forum posts – make people stop while scrolling through a forum thread and say, “hey – wtf?” And just like posting blog comments, be subtle about your intention (to generate traffic back to your website). Post relevant and interesting replies. Post additional questions. You know your material since you write about it, so play the role of the expert. Expect some criticism from other forum members. In many forums there are posters that read and post religiously. They like to pick on newbies. Also, make sure to read the rules in sticky topics as you could unintentionally make a thread reply that is against the forum rules and face potential banning from the forum.

Top Lists and Link Exchanges

Here’s a great google search: “add link” OR “add site” OR “link exchange” “”

It will return a list of websites that should allow you to submit your link, to be listed on their site, usually in exchange for a listing of their site on yours. This is called reciprocal linking. Quid pro quo. “I’ll list yours if you list mine”. There are literally thousands of link lists for any topic out there. Unfortunately many of those list sites aren’t necessarily high ranking and as such will add little to your own link rating, but it’s free, easy low hanging fruit.

Taking a step beyond top lists and automated link exchanges is setting up link exchanges manually with website owners of higher PR sites. Again, using Google, find the sites that top the searches for keywords that you’re using. Find an eligible site that’s high in the list. Then look to see if they have a contact form or something. All good sites (your site too) should have a contact form. Contact them through that. If they don’t have a contact form, you can bet on the website using a catch-all email address in which case you can send an email to “something”@websitename.com or whatever. Suppose the website I want to setup a link exchange with is www.website.com. I could try to send an email to admin@website.com, webmaster@website.com, contact@website.com and see what happens.

Regardless if you go the contact form or email route, always let them know that they have a great website and that you would be interested in a link exchange. Give them your website details and ask them to reply either way. I’ve also tried putting their link up before sending the request and letting them know that “Hey – you have a fantastic website! I’ve added link to blahblah.com from my website yadayada.com. My site is a high ranking site about yadayada and will likely provide you with some extra traffic as well as increase your traffic rating. Would you be able to add a link back to yadayada.com from your website? Let me know either way. Thanks!”

Setting up link exchanges manually is a hit or miss kind of thing. Out of 20 requests you might only get a couple that will oblige. But these websites may have higher value to Google or other search engines and a link from them might be worth 20 links from other sites. So the work definitely pays off.

Article Writing

Imagine you could put some of your best content on a high ranking website and include links back to your website in the article. Well you can. In the last few years a load of websites have been created that let so called “experts” write articles for their massive article database. These sites typically have good search ranking. Write good, related content (that isn’t a copy of something you already wrote on your website). Include a couple of links back to your website in the article. Distribute it to some of the top article sites such as Ezine Articles or Squidoo.

These are just a few ways of creating backlinks to your website. But I guarantee you that any site that sits higher than yours in a google search uses techniques such as these. So why aren’t you??

In part 2 of this series, I will look at exploiting social networking for website traffic.
Part 3 will continue with the social networking theme and discuss traffic generation through widget or app creation.
Part 4 will examine paid traffic generation – Adsense, Facebook ads and skimmed traffic included.
Finally, part 4 will look more at some blackhat type traffic generation techniques.