Google AdWords is the best method I have found to increase traffic to your website. You can write your own ads and aim them at people who are searching the web every day for what you have to say or sell. All of this can be done for pennies a day. Try it out!

Content site

Sites like this which contains large amounts of information. Almost all traffic is provided by a search engine. Users are looking for specific information, so the key to large traffic is a large amount of information. Few users are repeat visitors.

Commercial site

Sites which are sales fronts for businesses. They can either have a large catalogue of products, making the website similar to a "Content site", or drive traffic from offline advertisements.

Purpose site

Sites which perform a specific tool. For example a search engine or an email account. Most traffic comes from either a search engine or the url being memorized.

Entertainment site

Sites which typically provide a comedy aspect, where most traffic is driven by friends recommending the site in e-mails.

Note: This is by no means an exhaustive list, but will give you a brief idea of how targeting different methods of advertisements are appropriate for different sites.

Content sites:

This site www.groovyweb is a content site. It receives roughly 2000 visitors a day- the stats can be seen here. If you look at the refferer page you will probably see that of the last 20 refferers about 18 are from a search engine. More specifically, from yahoo or google (yahoo uses google for web searches).

Yahoo and google are the most common search engines and should be focused on, though some traffic comes from others like altavista and lycos. One of the referrers is probably also the site's domain name: www.groovyweb. This shows that for a content site like this the most important thing is to optimize every page for the search engines.

Optimizing for search engines:

If you view the source of a web page you will see at the top of the document is the following code...

<html>

<title>$page_name -Groovyweb tutorials Howto.tk</title>

<head>

</head>

<body>

<h1>$page_name</h1>A free tutorial archive, with a focus on programming, from msn to playsation programming. And computer security with password protection and command lists, as well as lots of FREE downloads.</div>

<input type=hidden name=page_name value="$page_name">

Where $page_name is the name of the page being viewed.

The site uses php and templates to automatically make the top of the document, the most important to the search engines, filled with search terms relevant to the document. Also, header (<h1>) tags are used as they make the text between them more important to the search engines.

However, dont think you can simple write a massive document all in headers with every word in the english dictionary, it will probably be placed last out of all search results if it is found. This is as the search engines use smart technology to place the most relevant documents at the top, the tips above can help with some of them.

Website Linking

A new feature of modern search engines, most notably google, is that pages are ranked by not just their relevance- but also the number of links to them. The idea is a better site will be linked to more, so it should be placed higher. Also, a link from a site like www.microsoft.com (which has millions of links to it) will be far more important than a link from an unknown page.

However, it is still definitely worth while making sure you're site has as many links to it as possible, it also means it will be found faster by search engines when they index all websites on the internet.

tutorial courtesy of: http://www.groovyweb.uklinux.net

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