The world wide web is a highly competitive market. Companies vie for the attention of billions of internet users in the search for higher revenue. A lynch pin to the internet marketing war is the search engine.

Search engines are internet venues where billions of people congregate to search for information. The most prominent search engine giants are of course Google and Yahoo. The kind of traffic these dot-com companies receive per hour is fantastic.

So naturally, companies would gravitate towards placing their links and sites in an attempt to garner more visits to their web sites.

In order to maximize ranking and placement, companies have used tools such as search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization is the method or process of improving a web site’s ranking in a search engine listing.

Legitimate search engine optimization practices focus on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving site content, usability and using legitimate methos of promotion through web phenomena such as viral marketing.

Search engines all use complex algorithms in keeping their relevancy in the web and to keep illegal and abusive search engine optimization methods from prospering. However, “black hat” SEO users will always be around so it is expected that search engine giant such as Google and Yahoo will continue to make more complex algorithms to filter the garbage out.

Search engines display different kinds of listings on a result page. The more common ones are (PPC) pay-per-click, adverts, paid inclusion, and organic listings. Of all these listings, SEO concerns itself foremost with organic listings for a variety of keywords. This can increase the quality and quantity or visitors to a desired web site.

Getting   or trying to increase   traffic to my website requires  a plan and  effort. The rewards are well worth it.

Organic searches are searches conducted by web users in a search engine that is free from solicitations. A study from Jupiter Media stated that 5 out of 6 commercial online purchases came from organic searches versus paid online ads.

This has made SEO much more in demand in creating revenue for companies as SEO is not a paid ad but a method of intrinsically improving content.

Here are a few tips on improving content for a much more improved result in organic searches:

1.    Expertise. Follow your strengths. Sites you set up must be on topics you consider yourself an expert on. People can smell an amateur a mile away.

2.    Plan the site. A good layout for the site can improve usability. This in turn will not unnecessarily aggravate the browser.

3.    Research. Check out the competition and see what they have set up. See what works and what does not. If possible try to communicate with users in forums and get feedback on what should or can be improved further.

4.    Decide on important keywords. Decide on the most important keywords to use for your sight. Include these keywords in the metatags, copy page, page title, and file names.

5.    The Search Engine is your friend. Make friends with your search engine and don’t give it a hard time. Being nice and friendly to it will make its job easier to serve your site up to your target audience.

6.    Focus. Focus on the topic at hand and nothing else. The typical rule is one topic per page.

7.    Join the directories. Directories are repositories of knowledge done by human hands while search engine are huge databases collected by mostly machine methods. The relevancy of your page when joining the right directory may shoot through the roof. Of course, make sure you know what you are talking about.

8.    Start a linking campaign. A most effective SEO method. This is a must do. Ask your allies, strategic partners, friends and acquaintances to place your site’s URL link on their sites. With a short description this can draw traffic from other sites and increase exposure. Google especially ranks the importance of its sites by the number of sites linked to it. 

9.    Repetition is the key to victory. Keep repeating the above tips, supporting and increasing what works and killing what does not as fast as possible until the desired result is achieved.

In the world of search engine optimization, content matters a lot. If a site has amateur or worse falsified information, fewer and fewer visitors will want to visit it. They will even spread bad news faster than good news so expect a garbage site to be ignored even in a week’s time.

Posting on forums, if used properly, can be an excellent way to get your name “out there”, and ultimately to build up a heap of traffic to your website.Note the emphasis on the words “if used properly”.

Good, relevant and useful content is the key here.

Let’s cut to the chase, if you expect to join a forum and to post a huge advertisement, and then sit back and wait for the massive amount of web traffic to hit your web site, then your probably going to be disappointed (not to mention waiting for a long time for it to happen).

You don’t spam people with email (hopefully!) and spamming a forum is just as bad (effectively posting a huge advertisement is spam) and will more often than not get you banned from the forum, and your post will get deleted, not to mention you will quickly get a reputation as a forum spammer.

Even though the Internet is a huge place, you might be surprised on just how fast word can get around for things like this. Don’t risk it.

Not spamming is even more important if your trying to become an expert in your niche area, because chances are the forum you just got banned from was a major one for your niche market if you had done your research properly.

So what is the best way to use a forum to get value out of it?

Firstly, find relevant forums for your niche market, and take the time to read the rules generally of the forum, and specifically the rules as they relate to forums posts.

To find forums use the search engine and look for forums and your keyword phrases.

e.g. Forums for car wholesalers, search for forum car wholesalers.

Some forums will not allow you to post any form of blatant advertisement, others may allow a signature block at the end of the post that can point to a website, with maybe a brief description of your site, others may not even allow that. Take the time to read up on just what is and isn’t allowed for each forum you sign up with.

Once you’ve done that, actually consider if you’re going to be able to add value to the forum by posting.

Do you have knowledge that can be used to help out other posters? Can you actually add decent content, that is not just along the lines of “Sounds like you need my affiliate-o-matic program, grab it from my website”.

Recognize that you should be able to reply to posts without doing selling of any kind (although hopefully you selected a forum that allowed a signature block in your posts, so that at the bottom of each of your fabulous relevant, and expert, rich in wisdom posts, there is also a link for people to reach you).

This signature should NOT be the focus of the post though; the focus of your posts is to actually help people by solving the particular problem or issue listed in the forum post.

When considering finding out more about traffic to web; it pays to listen to professional and do as much research as you can.

You will be astoundedhow quickly you can build up yourself as an expert in the forum, which adds immense credability and believability to you on the forum, meaning people will start coming to you for help!

The other huge bonus is that forum posts usually get picked up by the search engines so that over time your answers will get into the search engine results, and low and behold there is a link to your website in them!

Make sure your posts are in a forum that is relevant to your niche market. For example if you have answered questions in a gardening forum, and your signature at the bottom of each of your posts leads people to a sports site, you may be disappointed with the results.

In this case, lets assume your web site was sports related, you would have been far better off posting in a sports forum, but hopefully a sporting forum that is specific to the exact sports your website focuses on.

The search engines love relevancy, and you will find you will often actually lose points, and valuable rankings if you are just concentrating on getting large numbers of links, and not paying attention to using relevant forums to your niche market.

Remember the golden rule about one way links, a relevant one way link to your website from another site (including forums) is far, far more valuable if both sites have related content.

Make sure you look into posting of forums to get a boost in visitors to your site. This is a very easy way to get free traffic on your web site.

This article discusses paying other websites for the privilege of sending people to your website.

Note that Pay Per Click (PPC) the process of paying the search engines to list a sponsored link to your website in search engine results is such a large topic that it has it’s own article on this Website.

Now you may feel some reluctance to pay for advertising, and like any expense you should ensure it’s relevant and worthwhile to what you are trying to achieve.

It’s also critical that when paying for web traffic that you ensure you know your statistics.

You need to know the number of click throughs you are getting for a particular ad in order to gauge its effectiveness.

If your not actually tracking these statistics in some meaningful way they you have no way to determine if the paid traffic is providing a return on your investment. In other words you need to know exactly how many people are visiting your site by clicking the link on the site you paid advertising on.

This is one of the areas where I see a lot of people fall down, they make the decision to buy some advertising space from another website (or mailing list) and then do not track the effectiveness of it. How can you measure the effectiveness of an ad if you are not keeping statistics? (hint… You can’t!).

This is where decent ad tracking software comes into play, what you can do is set-up a new tracking link for each and every paid ad you set-up, so that you can know with certainty the amount of traffic you are receiving for it. Because each paid ad has a separate tracking link you know with certainly how many clicks you are getting on the link, and this gives you much more power as you have some real statistics you can use to gauge the effectiveness of each ad you pay for.

Now before we go into more detail, lets discuss the type of traffic you can buy, and discuss the pros and cons of each type of paid traffic method.

Banner Ad’s on Competitors Websites

This can be a great way to leverage visitors from another sites traffic. You usually pay a fixed fee per month for the banner ad and it’s then displayed for a full month on the website.

Depending on the amount of money you pay, it may be a fixed ad, or may be mixed in with a number of other ads and displayed on a rotational basis (e.g. visitor 1 is shown ad 1, visitor 2 is shown ad 2, etc).

Other options may include paying for a fixed number of impressions. E.g. 10,000 impressions in theory would mean that your ad would be displayed for 10,000 visitors to the website.

It’s very important that you choose your websites to buy ad space on very carefully. Obviously you want to ensure the website has products or services related to your particular niche, and that the website does have good number of visitors.

Usually when you approach the website the webmaster can give you some statistics on how many visitors they get per day on average, etc. If they can’t provide you some real life statistics I would suggest you pass on using that website.

Using various tools it is a relatively simple matter to determine how relevant the website is in the search engines.

Many people claim to be experts in the area of traffic to my website. We suggest you do some careful research yourself first before jumping in.Traffic web sites.

Another method of paying for web traffic is traffic websites. These are websites that you pay some form of membership fee to, and they then guarantee to send you a number of visitors. Sounds good in theory, and there are many good sites out there.

Remember that generally you don’t want just any type of traffic, rather, you want targeted qualified traffic.Which would you prefer 1,000,000 people arriving at your website with absolutely no interest in your product? Or 100 people who have an interest in the exact products you are selling?

I’m sure you will agree targeted traffic wins out over sheer volume any old day. You need to ensure the traffic website you sign up with does allow targeted traffic.

Also be wary of some of the less reputable sites that guarantee traffic to your website, as sometimes they achieve this by using automated computer software. It may appear that you have received the traffic (and your web logs may confirm it) however it is all traffic generated by a computer, meaning a human has not visited your site. Result? No sales, and a waste of money.

Ensure you use reputable companies to ensure you don’t get burnt. If you see a super duper offer offering a million visitors for it’s probably too good to be true!

General tips

Some general tips for any type of paid advertising.

1. Ensure your ad is of interest to and relevant to the visitors/readers.

There is no point advertising on a website or paying for an ad in a mailing list where visitors/readers have no interest in your website, most of the time you will be wasting your time as well as the visitors/readers. You will also be wasting any money you have paid for the advertising.

2. Do your sums to determine what you are trying to achieve – Weigh up the cost of the advertising, vs expected click throughs and profit. What is your break-ever point, how many sales do you need to make to break-even.

3. Use a good tracking software for every ad so you will always have the information at
your fingertips on how many people have connected, etc.

Check out Pro Track Manager, it is a fantastic product that I use myself and recommend.

You will be absolutely blown away by the features of this package and exactly what it can track. It can even track where people are leaving your website from, easily highlighting web pages you may need to work on some more.