5 Simple Website Tricks to Boost Response

If you've got a website but it's not making you any money, here are a few things you can do to improve it.

1. Target your website to ONE specific audience.

Nothing will kill response more than trying to target a very broad audience or audience(s).

People are looking for very specific information and solutions so don't be afraid to go tighter with your niche.

If you have a website about "low fat recipes", then don't have ads or articles about "twitter marketing" and vise versa.

Also, targeting your site or pages for very specific keywords such as "low fat kids recipes" will be much easier and better for your business than trying to get people just looking for "low fat recipes".

Sure the audience for "low fat kids recipes" might not be as big but those who do you attract will be a much better target to take you up on an offer.

2. Collect Leads With An Optin Form

Not collecting leads is a big mistake!

The best way is to use a squeeze page..just a simple page with a blurb about your free offer and an opt in form...Nothing else!

Even if you have a blog or online store, you can use the sidebar or a pop up ad to place an optin form in.

Make sure your optin form is highly visible!

The best place to have it is in the top fold of your page (the portion of your page that appears when it first loads).

Or you can use a cool tool like a slide up ad or floating ad so it stays on screen as the visitor moves up and down.

3. Use a nice color scheme.

Nothing scares away visitors faster than a page that looks like it was put together by a 3 year old.

Black on white is the always the best combination.

Sure, some nice headers graphics and images of your product will help but don't over do it with unnecessary images. It might be cool to you but it is doing more bad than good.

Also, having all the colors of the rainbow on your page will kill your site's professionalism.

Keep banner ads and out going links to a minimum. Having too many will confuse your visitor (especially if they are unrelated to your main website topic).

4. Have "call to actions" throughout each page.

On a sales letter it's obvious...as is on a squeeze page...you need to have a strong call to action to get them to buy or opt in.

But why just settle for one way down the bottom?

Have "call to actions" at the top, in the middle and at the bottom...insert your order link or opt in form there too.

If you write a blog, insert links in the post with your text "click here to learn more" for example.

Or a cool idea is to ask for comments or "give permission" to subscribe to your RSS feed or to Re-tweet your post on twitter.

Many people know they can, but when you say they have permission, they are more likely to do it.

5. Be A Real Person & An Authority Figure!

Yes, many people will still take action (buy or optin) at your site because they don't know you.

For a first time visitor, you need to establish trust with them and show them you're an authority.

How to do this?

1. Use a picture of you.

2. Use real testimonials with pictures of those people.

3. Show proof that what you are selling works.

screen shots, or other images to prove it)

4. Have contact info. Email, phone number, skype name.

5. Reveal some useful info/expertise.

Trackback and How It Can Improve Your Blog Traffic

What is trackback and how can it help you to improve your blog traffic?

Trackback is one of traffic technique. It is a technique when you leaving a comments on someone blog or website and put you blog/site link on your comment. However it is time consuming unless you have a lot of time to search every blog/site related to your blog topic, reading it and then comments on it.

Simply said, trackback is one kind of blog conversation that links two or more relevant blog entries together. One blogger writes an article that references or is relevant to another blog's article and fills out the trackback section. When the blogger publishes the article the blog leaves a trackback on the other blog's article, which usually appears in the comments area as a truncated summary with a link.

I will show you how to send a trackback, the way I understand it.

Each blogging software system handles trackbacks differently. Bloggers can also choose to switch trackbacks off or require every trackback be approved before going live, so don't be surprised when you send a trackback and it doesn't show up, it may have nothing to do with you.

Some blogs will trackback automatically, or attempt to, especially if they are the same format. For example a WordPress blog trackbacking a WordPress blog. In that case as long as you include a link to the other blog's post your blog will attempt a trackback (sometimes called a "pingback").

Usually you have to manually enter a trackback URI into the blog entry you are creating. You can find the trackback URI at the end of most blog posts (take a look at your blog posts for the term "Trackback URI" or similar).

By the way -

URL = Uniform Resource Locator, a fancy name for 'Link'

URI = Uniform Resource Identifier, another fancy name for 'Link'

How To Improve Your Traffic by Trackbacking?

If you trackback someone else's blog post you are leaving a link that points back to your blog. Someone who reads the blog article may click through from the link and visit your blog. In some cases, if they are not using the "nofollow" tag, you get some PageRank juice which will help your search engine rankings.

Trackbacks are good because they bring traffic to your blog when you trackback other blogs. Being the "victim" of a trackback is also good because
it means another blogger has read your blog and deemed something you wrote worthy of including in their blog. There is a good chance if they trackbacked you that they also made a direct link to your blog too.

This helps your social proofing because it provides evidence that other people are reading and responding to your blog articles. However the real power of trackbacking is an awareness building tool to get the attention of other bloggers.

When you first start blogging not many people will know your blog exists. By trackbacking other bloggers you demonstrate interest in their content which is a surefire way to make them interested in you and your blog.

It's very likely that the blogger you trackbacked will follow the link and see what your blog is all about. If you have been following my advice and have written some pillar articles your new visitor will like what they see, very likely subscribe to your blog and if you are lucky may even trackback you or mention your blog in a future entry on their blog.

If nothing else, by trackbacking a blogger you will forever occupy some of their mind-space, which in the future may open up all kinds of doors and opportunities for traffic.

There's a lot of other way to improve your blog traffic. If you love to read other people post, then trackback is suitable for you.

The Importance of Referrer Logs

Referrer logging is used to allow web servers and websites to identify where people are visiting them either for promotional or security purposes. You can find out which search engine they used to find your site and whether your customer has come from a ‘linked site’. It is basically the URL of the previous webpage from which your link was followed.

By default, most hosting accounts don’t include referrer logs but may be subscribed for an extra monthly fee. If your web host does not provide a graphic report of your log files, you can still view the referrer logs for your website by logging into the host server using free or low-cost FTP software, like these:

• FTP Explorer: http://www.ftpx.com/
• LogMeIn: http://secure.logmein.com/dmcq/103/support.asp
• SmartFTP: http://www.smartftp.com/
• FTP Voyager: http://www.ftpvoyager.com/
  

The log file is available on your web server which can be download into your computer later. You can use a log analysis tool, like those mentioned below, to create a graphic report from your log files so that the files are easier to understand.

• Abacre Advanced Log Analyzer :http://www.abacre.com/ala/
• Referrer Soft : http://www.softplatz.com/software/referrer/
• Log Analyzer : http://www.loganalyzer.net

You can view the files using Word, Word Perfect, txt or WordPad files even if you don’t have the right tool. This information is very crucial to your business and marketing plans and is not advisable to neglect it.

In addition to identifying the search engine or linked site from where your visitor arrived, referrer logs can also tell you what keywords or keyword phrases your client used for searching.

As referrer information can sometimes violate privacy, some browsers allow the user to disable the sending of referrer information. Proxy and Firewall software can also filter out referrer information, to avoid leaking the location of private websites. This can result in other problems, as some servers block parts of their site to browsers that don't send the right referrer information, in an attempt to prevent deep linking or unauthorized use of bandwidth. Some proxy software gives the top-level address of the target site itself as the referrer, which prevents these problems and still not divulging the user's last visited site.

Since the referrer can easily be spoofed or faked, however, it is of limited use in this regard except on a casual basis.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site. Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%.

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

Try it and Good luck!

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.


Consider all the things that matters as discuss above if you want to increase your page ranking. Work closely with the crawler. Good luck.

The Importance of Search Engines For Your Blog

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. When a topic is typed for search, nearly instantly, the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about and present you with ones that match your topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first 2-3 listings in the search results. So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking.

Further, they all use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else. So finally it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the Keywords that play an important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your website.

It is found by surveys that a when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find their site in one of the following ways:-

• The first option is they find their site through a search engine.
• Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.
• Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.
  

Thus it’s obvious the the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Don’t forget that algorithms also give weightage to link population (number of web pages linking to your site). When performed by a qualified, experienced search engine optimization consultant, your site for high search engine rankings really does work, unless you have a lot of money and can afford to pay the expert.

With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can also do it on your own.

Tips to Get Repeat Web Traffic

Here is few tips on how to get repeat web traffic to your site/blog

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.
   
2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.
   
3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.
   
4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.
   
5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.
   
6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.
   
7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.
   
8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.
   
9. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.
   
10. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.

The Summary Tips to Increase Ranking and Website Traffic

It is worth cataloguing the basic principles to be enforced to increase website traffic and search engine rankings.

• Create a site with valuable content, products or services.
• Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document.
• Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers.
• Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags, Headers, etc.
• Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services.
• Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do so, if required. Be sure this is a manual submission. Do not engage an automated submission service.
• Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and processes and accordingly modify your web pages so your search engine ranking remains high. Use online tools and utilities to keep track of how your website is doing.
• Monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing right in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.
• Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.
• Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc.
• Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field.
• When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customer’s experience fast and easy.
• When not sure, hire professionals. Though it may seem costly, but it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on a website which no one visits.
• Don’t look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness.

That's all I got for today. I will try to update soon. Stay with me.

Traffic Tactics : Use Keywords In Page Titles

It is recommended to use keywords in page titles itself. This title tag is different from a Meta tag, but it's worth considering it in relation to them. Whatever text one places in the title tag (between the portions) will appear in the title bar of browsers when they view the web page. Some browsers also append whatever you put in the title tag by adding their own name, as for example Microsoft's Internet Explorer or OPERA.

The actual text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major web crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

If you have designed your website as a series of websites or linked pages and not just a single Home Page, you must bear in mind that each page of your website must be search engine optimized. The title of each page i.e. the keywords you use on that page and the phrases you use in the content will draw traffic to your site.

The unique combination of these words and phrases and content will draw customers using different search engine terms and techniques, so be sure you capture all the keywords and phrases you need for each product, service or information page.

The most common mistake made by small business owners when they first design their website is to place their business name or firm name in every title of every page. Actually most of your prospective customers do not bother to know the name of your firm until after they have looked at your site and decided it is worth book marking.

So, while you want your business name in the title of the home page, it is probably a waste of valuable keywords and space to put it in the title line of every page on your site. Why not consider putting keywords in the title so that your page will display closer to the top of the search engine listing.

Dedicating first three positions for keywords in title avoiding the stop words like ‘and’, ‘at’ and the like is crucial in search engine optimization.

The 2 Types of Traffic Exchanges

Hi, I post about using a traffic exchanges to boost your traffic few weeks ago. How you try one? There are generally 2 types of traffic exchanges out there.

The first and most common type simply lets you earn hits directly from your downline. Many big-name sites like I Love Hits, Traffic Splash, Dragon Surf, Major League Hits are like this. When you get a referral who starts surfing in these, you'll earn a percentage of his points for yourself.

These are good and very important in the long run, as they'll ultimately provide you with the most "free" traffic once you get moving, but they're hard to earn significant amounts of traffic on (especially as a free member) in the short run. Don't ignore them completely, since you'll want to start building a downline on them ASAP, but don't drive yourself nuts trying to get significant amounts of credits on all of them from day 1. I'd recommend rotating these sites and trying to surf 100 pages on one or two every day (by rotate them, I mean pick one or two every day and surf 100 on those; the next day take another one or two).

The other type of exchange, which is much more powerful for complete newbies are co-op or syndicate based systems. To the best of my knowledge, all of Logitech's surf exchanges (TS25, TrafficPods, TrafficEra, etc) are syndicate based. What this means is that you don't need a downline to get leverage.

In a site like this, you can automatically get into a co-op or syndicate of other surfers, work together to build massive amounts of traffic credits, and then get a hefty share yourself. You can easily get several thousand hits per week in bonuses alone within 2 weeks with these sites.

Usually, there's a hefty quota of surfing you'll need to maintain to qualify to stay inside the co-op (usually ~1000 sites surfed per week for free members; paid members will usually get their quota waived, but won't see significant bonuses without surfing at least 100-300 sites per week). You'll probably have to surf even more the first week to "qualify" for a syndicate position (unless you're a paid member, in which case you automatically qualify from day 1), but the rewards are well worth it.

In conclusion, you will need to choose which system work for you in deciding on which traffic exchange to pick. If you hate the downline building task, then you might want to pick the second option.

Have Fun!