Found this article over at Build A Better Blog, — Denise met up with Willie Crawford at an affiliate marketing event where he was doing a presentation on driving traffic. While she was listening she jotted down a checklist of traffic generation tips. It is a checklist and one well worth taking note of. You should also take the time to prowl through the comments and find some more tips to add to the list.

Don’t forget to check out the link to Willie Crawford’s blog either. He’s top notch at teaching others how to do Internet Marketing.

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21 Traffic Driving Tips

Build it and then will come. Once the rallying cry of those who were willing to take chances in life and reach for the stars on big ideas. On the web, that translated into fill a website with high quality content and they would come. Using a bunch of good search phrases and in the HTML would bring you lots of traffic. At least that was the theory.

That wasn’t completely true. If you failed to optimize your pages for not only your product but related ways of referring to the product searchers would not be able to find you. So, all the great content in the world wasn’t going to help if the pages weren’t optimized.

Optimization matters but as search engine algorithms evolve they started to place less emphasis on optimization and more on having other sites linking to yours. The more quality inbound links, the more important the site. So, how to get those links?

Reciprocal links were very popular and effective at one time but they have lost their value. Once people started setting up link farms with links from across the spectrum, they lost any value. The search engine algorithms adjusted to drop the value of sites trading irrelevant links. Links now need to be one-way unpaid links relevant to the topic of the site. They get the search engines ‘vote of confidence’.

The theory is that if you have great content other sites will link to you. Other people will follow the links, read your site and then link also. Sounds good but, that is not really common. There is more wrong than right with that theory.

The first and most obvious problem is, how do you get people to the site in the first place? Without incoming links, the search engines ignore you. Second, will those visitors who manage to find you without already having established inbound links, have websites to even link to you from, assuming they want to. Most visitors don’t have sites nor do they know how to link.

Serious webmasters tend to be stingy with their links. They hesitate to link to their competition. When inbound links count, providing links to competition increases their value without any returned value for the webmaster’s site.

So, if incoming links is the way to get more website traffic, what exactly is a webmaster to do. Paying for links, especially when you are just starting out is not practical and if the search engines like Google catch on, you could find yourself out of them.

Now, before you start thinking that building a great site with quality content is passe, think about what you are looking for when you go searching. You want to find sites that inform you about the subject you are searching on. When you find a high quality content site, you stay on it and explore, right? So, you still need to provide high quality content on your site.

A great way to get inbound links for your site is to create articles and post them to article directories. Once you’ve written all that great content, writing some articles can’t be that hard, can it? Once you attract some readers, some of them will even take the articles and put them on their website, voila!, one way link created.

Even better, if they want more, they will click the link in the article resource box and you’ll then have traffic too.

What is your favourite traffic magnet for your site?

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How to Attract Website Traffic

David Berkowitz over at Search Insider has posted an interesting article about the site Social Rank. Somewhat similar to PageRank, the site collects together ‘communities’ of blogs and measures their social rank within the community. It culls the most important blog posts within the community based on comments from visitors, backlinks from other blogs and several other factors.

The strongest Social Rank would be posts with the greatest amount of discussion within a niche area. After reading through David’s article and the Social Rank site I’m not really clear on how a blog catches the attention of the algorithm. One major use I can see for the site is that it is a very quick way to hunt out the hottest topics in any niche when you’re looking either for products to create or articles to post.

Definitely going into my blogroll.

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Social Rank Measures Your Site

Building a blog and entering a steady stream of quality content is just he first two steps in having a successful blog. In offline real estate you often hear the mantra “location, location, location”. Well, online, what decides success or failure after delivering quality content and user experience is the amount of traffic you can generate to your site. The more targetted that traffic can be, the better.

There are no magic bullets for what generates traffic. I’ve had days where traffic starts to show up and I have no idea why except somewhere along the line one of the methods I’ve used has generated some traffic. That traffic might continue on a regular basis or be a one off stream. So, you really do have to explore as many ways as you can to generate traffic.

Periodically, I wander off on a forray to hunt down traffic generation methods. I don’t always find new ideas but quite often I find ideas I’ve read and glossed over that need a second look. In one of my most recent expeditions, I found several sites which had lists of traffic suggestions. I’m going to share them with you.

Tips To Consider While Boosting Your Blog Traffic – posted Feb. 17, 2007 at Evolutionary IMarketing Success

Ben Yoskovitz Really Is An Instigator — posted Feb. 16, 2007 at Healthy Webdesign. This one is a bit of a different twist. Dawud has posted links from another blog which are articles on that blog to help you build your traffic. Instead of having to visit and dig them out yourself, he’s done the work.

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs – SEO — posted August 15, 2005 at ProBlogger. Darren Rowse is one blog that I follow on a regular basis.

How to Get Traffic to Your Blog — posted June 3, 2006 at Seth’s Blog. This is one I return to repeatedly and I’m still learning from his list. Seth is the author of Unleashing the Idea Virus.

How To Drive Traffic to Your Blog – The Advice of a 12 Year Old — posted Feb. 13, 2007 at ProBlogger. Well written piece by a teenager. Don’t let his age fool you.

21 Tips to Increase Blog Traffic — posted Aug. 31, 2006 at SEOmoz. Excellent tips.

How to Build Traffic to Your Blog – posted Dec. 10, 2004 at WebProNews. This post includes a couple of links to Blog Directories you’ll want in order to get your blog listed.

Building Blog Traffic for Newbies — posted Feb. 17, 2007 at Blog Herald.

HOW TO: Boost Your Blog Traffic – posted Nov. 3, 2005 at PaulStamatiou.com. Not sure how to pronounce that but he’s got some excellent suggestions and links to resources.

OK. There is what I found on this hunting expedition. Enjoy, let me know what works and if you find other resources, come on back and post a comment with a link to the resource.

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Traffic, Traffic, Traffic