How to Market Your Website

Archive for the ‘Marketing Your Website’ Category

There are a ton of traffic surfing websites out there. Basically how it works is browse other people’s websites for about 20 seconds and you get a credit. Then that credit can be used for someone else to browse to your website. I guess you can say it’s like trading traffic. Most of these websites are free to signup but I wouldn’t suggest it as
the best way of getting traffic. You may get a lot of traffic but traffic surfing is very tedious and the traffic you receive may not always be meaningful. Because when you are forced to browse someone’s site to get a credit, how many of those sites would you actually browse?

If you do end up using these traffic surfing websites and track your traffic with tools such as Google Analytics. You may notice your bounce rate is high. Basically, the closer it is to 100%, that means visitors are not staying on your site very long and more than likely exiting after seeing the first page of your website.

But if you are just looking just to generate any type of traffic, then using these sites are worth a shot. Below are some traffic surfing sites we can can recommend and have used before:

Trafficswarm: TrafficSwarm is probably the best one out of the bunch here. The bounce rate is still high but you actually get some unique visitors that go through your site. There is also a web directory within TrafficSwarm you can search for and get credit for visiting those sites. I have found some useful sites in their directory. Google Analytics show the bounce rate at 87.7% after getting hundreds of referral hits from the website.

EasyHits4U: Get easy traffic but bounce rate high. Google Analytics show the bounce rate at 95.3% after receiving hundreds of referral hits from the website.

TrafficG: Get easy traffic but bounce rate high. Google Analytics show the bounce rate at 96.7% after receiving hundreds of referral hits from the website.

Webmasterquest: Get easy traffic but bounce rate high. Google Analytics show the bounce rate at 100% after receiving hundreds of referral hits from the website. 100% is not good! That means every single visitor that goes onto your website is exiting after viewing your home page.

What is a Banner Exchange?

A Banner Exchange is another way of exchanging traffic through the use of banner advertisement. An example is placing code on your website which will display the banners. Depending on the banner exchange program you are apart of you earn credits every time a banner is displayed on your website. Those credits are used for impressions. Impressions pretty much means the number of views that the banner displays. So basically, when you earn impression credits, your banner will be displayed on other websites who are part of the same banner exchange program.

The one question people may ask is: are banner exchanges effective?

Personally I’ve tried both banner exchange programs and even paying for banner advertising and I’ve noticed the click ratio is usually pretty bad. I don’t think banner advertising is that effective unless your website really targets a specific audience on a website. An example is if you are a rock band releasing a CD, it is probably best to target music or to be more exact, rock fan pages that have similar taste to your band. But this is just my personal opinion and experience. Who knows, maybe banner exchanges may be effective for your website.

A lot of the banner exchanges I use to know no longer exist so I have been experimenting with new banner exchange programs just to see if they are effective or not. I will also be updating this post time to time once I have experimented with more banner exchange programs. So far I’ve tried the following:

BannersXchange: This banner exchange is probably the best one out of the other ones I’ve tried so far. The click ratio is still bad but at least I was able to get some clicks. The click ratio for this one was about 3-5 clicks for every 500 impressions.

eBannerTraffic: eBannerTraffic was not very effective. You do have the option of using different sized banners such as 468×60 to skyscraper or smaller sized banners. I have tried the 468×60 banner and I’ve received 0-1 click for every 500 impressions.

Adsvert: Adsverts was not very effective for me. Instead of your link appearing as a banner, it appears as text. They give 2500 free impressions but after finishing my credits off in a week I received ZERO clicks.

Whambanners: I didn’t have a good experience with this website. My banner was displayed over 2500 times and I did not receive a single click!

Wikipedia defines Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as:

“the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.”

What is a Meta Tag?

Mega Tags are placed in the header section of your website. They contain information such as title, description, and keywords that can help your visibility in search engines and can also help you move up in rank. These tags also help play a role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Here is an example of how mega tags look like:
Example of a Meta Tag

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Example of a Mega Tag</TITLE>
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Example of a Meta Tag”>
<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”meta,meta tag, meta tags, tag, search engine, SEO”>
</HEAD>

If you need assistance with creating these meta tags, www.addme.com offers a free meta tag creator.

There are several ways to submit your website to search engines but the easiest way is to do it for free.

The 2 biggest search engines out there are Google and Yahoo.  You can start off by submitting your website to them.

Google – http://www.google.com/addurl
Yahoo – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Other notable search engines:
MSN – http://www.msn.com
DMOZ (submission can be a little confusion) – http://www.dmoz.org

Multiple search engine submissions (free third-party tools)
Submit Express – http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html
Addme – http://www.addme.com

You can also Google “add url” and find other websites and search engines to submit it. It can get redundant and repetitive but what I do is copy what you need in an application like MS Word or Notepad and you can copy and paste the information as you go along.

Click the link to search – http://www.google.ca/search?q=add+url