Why Give a Party If Nobody Comes - Improve Web Site Traffic

A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Samwell

Basic Ways to Improve Web Site Traffic

If you have a web site you should always be looking at ways to improve web site traffic, after all whether it is a business site or not, you want to have traffic to your web site. Why would you do all of that work if no-one comes to see it. One of the most basic ways to improve the traffic to your Web Site is to have a lot of desirable content. This could include such things as tutorials, downloadable files, or graphics Or something humorous.

Of course if it is an ecommerce web site you would have a good product that would hopefully bring in traffic once people initially found you and started spreading the word. Word of mouth can be surprisingly effective with a good product.

List Your Site with Search Engines to Improve Web Site Traffic

Although Search engines will list you once they find you, they first have to know that you exist. Many people believe that search engines can find anything just by "casting a big net". This is not true. Search engines are basically extremely large databases, that contain large amounts of web information, cataloged by key words. If you have a web site, the best way to get listed, is by submitting your url to the search engine.

Most Web Host sites will have an application to submit your site to a large number of web sites by click on a button on your administrative site. This will cause the search engine to use an application called a spider to crawl your site. Different search engines look at sites in different ways.

Google looks at a page for instance, it takes note of two things. First the words in the page with the exception of a, an, and the, and second where those words were found. Words in the Meta Tags, title and subtitles and other places of relative importance are noted for special consideration in subsequent user searches. You will notice this when you do a search on Google, as they tell you that a, and the, etc. were not included in the search.

Lycos on the other hand keeps track of the words in the title, sub-headings and links, along with the 100 most frequently used words on the page and each word in the first 20 lines of text.

Alta Vista uses still another approach by cataloging every word on the site, including the relatively unimportant words such as a an and the. This push to completeness often results in a relatively large number of not very relevant hits.

The most important thing about submitting your pages, is to not do it more than once every six weeks approximately, even if you aren't getting hits right away. If you submit your site too frequently, the search engine might flag your submissions as spam and block any further attempts to list it.

Improve Web Site Traffic with Meta Tags

Meta Tags are groups of keywords that describe your site, that are found in the head section of your web page. They are not visible on your site but they are very important in listing your site to search engines.

It is a good idea to do some research into meta tag keywords to find out which are the most popular search terms. You do have to remember though, to keep your keywords relevant to the site. If the search engine spider crawls your site and sees that the keywords have no relevance to the rest of the site, you won't be listed very highly, if indeed, you are listed at all. The best idea when choosing meta tags is to err on the side of caution and keep things relevant.

You can always change them when you resubmit your site. If you haven't used irrelevant meta tags, the search engine should take another look at your page, but if you exaggerate with your keywords the first time you submit they might flag your page and refuse to spider it again.

Improve Web Site Traffic by Exchanging Links

Another way to improve web site traffic is by exchanging links with people. If you have an ecommerce site you can trade links with your trading partners or other complementary sites. Even by just exchanging links with friends or family members, or by having a link to a site that is popular, you can use your link as a meta tag and improve traffic.

So don't forget to: 1. Submit your site to search engines - but not too often

2. Use good Meta Tags - but keep them relevant

3. Find people to exchange links with.

If you do these things, you should be able to generate a good amount of traffic. So keep on trying and be patient, if you build it they will come!