Free Website Traffic to Your Web Pages

Without traffic, your website is virtually worthless. There are many ways in which you can drive masses of website traffic to your web pages, but there are only two significant free ways in which to do that.

No, its not by joining forums or trying to use Web2 or social networking sites. Don’t believe everything you are told about these. I use them all. I belong to more forums that there are days in the month, and can count on one hand the number that actually provides me with a visitor to my website now and again.

If you belong to google Technorati, Facebook, Spurl, MySpace and every other social site in the top thirty list, they can be useful, but don’t provide a fraction of the traffic to your website that you can achieve in other ways, simply because that is not what these sites are for. The so-called Web2 sites, or social networking or bookmarking sites, are for social intercourse and allowing people an easy way to communicate with each other.

They are not to provide traffic to you, and many feel resentful that their good sites have been hijacked by internet marketers as a means of generating traffic and advertising to their websites. In fact a few such sites have died due to spamming by advertisers who had no interest in using the sites as they were intended to be used. There are other social sites that are currently at risk for the very same reason.

The way to get masses of free website traffic is through rapid listings on the major search engines, and then improving those listings until they are in the top 10 of the major two: Google and Yahoo. MSN is growing, and you will likely get listed there if you are already in the big two.

There are ways of doing this without having to hurt other websites, and that is to understand what the search engines are seeking when they crawl your web pages. Most will say that nobody knows what they are looking for, but that is nonsense. Perhaps the unsuccessful don’t know, but many do, and if you use that knowledge then you can beat, not only the spiders, but also your competitors.

In fact, to be realistic, nobody will ever beat the search engines since they will change their algorithms whenever they feel that they need to be changed in order to maintain or improve their service to their customers. Since these customers are the users that are seeking information, then the algorithms will change to improve the quality of that information. And rightly so!

Many people believe the search engine the enemy, and something to be beaten. Many SEO experts feel the same. The correct attitude to take is that the search engines are trying to meet the needs of their customers in the best way that they can. If you do the same with your web pages, then you and the search engines will have the same objective, and your task for a high listing will suddenly become a lot easier.

There are ways to achieve this without having to spend lots of money. Provide the information that would normally be logically sought by somebody using your web page keyword as their search term. Don’t fill your content full of the keyword, but provide genuine information right on topic. Each of your web pages are judged separately, so use them for different keywords and provide information on each that relates to that keyword.

Don’t use each page for the same topic. Think on what you want to find when you are looking for information online, and provide that to your visitors. If they are impressed they might bookmark your site, which might appear in the social bookmarking websites and be spotted by others interested in your topic. That is what such sites are for, not blatant advertising.

However, don’t forget how spiders read your pages. There are ways to optimize each web page for the spiders as well as for humans. Achieve the correct balance between both, and you will win. Fail, and you will lose. It is a simple as that.

The search engines are not ogres; that are not after you, or they would be after everybody and no websites would survive. They simply want to be sure that your information will meet the needs of their customers. That’s why meta tags are largely meaningless, since the crawler will make its own mind up based upon the content of your page.

That is also why internal lining strategies are of critical importance, since you can send spiders on whatever trail you want to lead them. However, you have to know what you are doing with that or you are likely to fail utterly and end up with your web page invisible online among the supplementary results rather than drive masses of free website traffic to your web pages.