How to Increase Traffic to New Sites

It seems that more and more people are turning to the web to maximize profits. Some are those who own their own sites and others are affiliates selling products or services for other companies. No matter what the purpose (make money, gain exposure, be discovered, etc.), any person who doesn't maintain a web presence is limiting the amount of exposure they get for their business or personal cause. The hardest part about starting a web site is getting traffic to the site. Even though most search engines constantly crawl the web for relevant sites for search queries, where on a list of search results a site will end up depends on the site's popularity and relevance. One way to easily establish popularity and relevance is through the use of strategically placed back links.

A back link is simply a link on the web that "links back" to your website. While there are several legitimate ways to distribute your links, one successful way, I have found, is through the use of Internet forums.

An Internet forum is a virtual message board where members can post questions, carry on discussions, and even take part in debates. In most cases, forum administrators will forbid any sort of disrespectful or rude behavior which keeps the conversations pretty clean (or at least PG-13). Many forums require membership in order to post messages to other users, but membership is usually free.

Once a user is allowed full access to a forum, the user can begin participating in discussions and responding to messages left by other users. Many forums will restrict blatant promotion attempts, so users must be careful to understand the rules of each forum they participate in. One way to get around being labeled as a spammer is to post links in relevant messages only. The topic of the message must be directly related to the topic of the site that is being promoted. Therefore, a baking site should never be mentioned in a post about auto repair. This will just confuse search engines and place the site being promoted somewhere at the bottom of the "results" page.

Even if the post is directly related to the content of the site being promoted, randomly tossing in a link to a third party site is a good way to get flagged in the forums. The link to the site should be mentioned as naturally as possible. For example, the owner of a baking site could post a message in a baking forum and end with something like "I have over 20 years of experience as a baker and I am the owner of www.ExampleBakingSite.com". Posting a link like this is allowed by most forums because it seeks to establish a person's qualifications to answer a question or take part in a discussion. By attaching the link to topic relevant content, search engines will slowly associate the attached link to whatever topic the forum is associated with and will therefore associate the link as relevant to the topic of the forum. In our example, placing a link to a baking site in a baker's forum will teach search engines to recognize the third party site as relevant to baking, which will slowly raise the site's rank in search engine result pages each time a baking related term is searched.

Individuals promoting their own sites can also initiate discussions based on information from the third party site or by simply asking forum users to comment on certain sections of the third party site.

This method of site exposure is slow and takes time, but it will lead to real and repeat site visitors. If a site owner plans on making continuous or generating substantial advertisement revenue from their site, real and repeat visitors are what they want.