Building quality, one way links to your website can be difficult, time consuming and frustrating. It is generally agreed that the best way to build links is to build them gradually over time, relying on natural links to your original, frequently updated content.

There are, however, a few shortcuts to building up links. They are not easy ways to make your site popular, nor are they guaranteed to work for everybody. They are simply some casual tips to help you obtain a few quality inbound links.

Submit Articles to Digg

Google absolutely loves Digg. The site is spidered very frequently and the domain has a lot of authority in terms of link building. Even stories with no diggs will still be spidered, so long as there is a navigational path for the spiders to use to reach it. Google cannot use the number of diggs as any sort of authority when ranking a URL, yet…

For the best long term effects only submit good quality articles to Digg. Or better yet, let your users submit the articles that they think are worthwhile. You will quickly get a reputation as a spammer if you keep posting unpopular content.

Other Social Networking sites

Submitting to Social Bookmarking and social networking sites can be hot and miss for some people.

Some social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Twitter use “nofollow” on their links so they cannot influence rankings. Other sites, such as Furl, do not.

Having your links on a few social network profiles may also be useful in building up the number of links. For others it is simply not worth it. While some, such as Facebook, do use “nofollow” on their links, some do not. However, the weight that these links carry is relatively low, despite the authority these domains actually carry.

“Widgetbait”

Widgetbait is a term thrown around for an object that is added to a user’s website or blog. This item features a link back to the authors website. If the object is installed on many thousands of websites, this results in many thousands of backlinks. The classic examples of widgetbait include online quizzes, IQ tests or horoscopes.

While these links are valuable to some, for others the quality of the link and the traffic it brings is just too low. If the text of the link bears no relation to the page in which it is contained, Google becomes suspicious. Additionally, the text that links back to the site must relate to the widget, and, the link must go back to the author’s website, not a third party site.

A classic example of spammy widgetbait would be an IQ test that features a text link to an online dating site. Google would soon hear of this and the sites involved, including the sites distributing the widget and the site being linked to would be penalised.

The Best Kind of WidgetBait: Just Build Something Useful

The best type of widgetbait is to simply create something that people want to use. Classic examples of this are Winamp Skins, modifications for forum software such as Invision Power Board and plugins or themes for Wordpress. Why are these good ideas? They will result in you being listed on the official website of each respective product. These sites are popular and the links they feature carry a lot of influence.

Find high PageRank Sites that allow Backlinks

This excellent tool from Seo Chat allows you to perform a web search and sort the results by PageRank. You can look for websites relevant to your content from which you may be able to get backlinks. Good examples include forums and blogs. Always ensure that these sites do not use nofollow on their links.

What About Directories?

Web directories used to be incredibly helpful in building up the number of incoming links to a website. The usefulness of directories is decreasing over time and many people question whether there is any worth in pursuing directory submissions at all. The two notable exceptions to this are the Open Directory Project and Yahoo! Directory. The following list outlines the main problems with using directories. Ultimately, it is up to you to decide if it is a strategy worth pursuing.

Does it Check the Quality and Topic of Submissions?

Any free-for-all web directory that has not been penalised by Google is just one site review away from being so. These are nothing more than spam farms. The directorys editors should at least check the site to verify the given information and ensure the site is legitimate.

On a similar note, web directories should generally be targeted to a specific audience. Most general web directories that have no specific focus will not be of any use to you.

Can it Still Pass PageRank?

While PageRank is far from being the answer to every SEO question, it is still a useful indication as to how “useful” Google thinks a page is. Bear in mind that the most up to date Page Rank is at least a few months old. Use the following strategy to determine if a site has been penalised in Google:

1. Search for the websites title in Google.
2. Search for a large block of text from the sites homepage.
3. Search for the actual domain in Google.

If the site doesnt rank for one and two, but it does for number three, it has been penalised in Google and probably wont be able to pass PageRank. If it does not rank for any of these steps, the site has probably not been indexed by Google.

Any directory that has been penalised by Google has done something against Googles guidelines. Dont associate your website with any directory like this. Google is seriously cracking down on paid links. Any spammy web directory, particularly those that charge for links, are in the firing line as far as being penalised by Google.

Does a Link on this Directory Actually Mean Anything?

Dont submit to a directory just for a link. Make sure the link is worth your time. A link is not worth having if:

• The specific category pages are not indexed,
• There are too many links on a single page – having too many links on a single page with dilute down the ranking influence that is passed, or
• The directory has very little traffic to send to your website

If you decide to use a web directory, this article entitled 50 Page Rank 3 Or Higher Free Website Directories is a good resource. Just remember to assess the quality of the directory first.

Areas to Avoid

Two of the main places that people try to spam for backlinks are Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. Both of these sites use nofollow in their links. There is often misunderstanding and false information given about this, but it is true for both sites. If the situation ever changes or you need to verify it for yourself, simply look at the source code on each website. The new service from Google, Knol, also uses a nofollow meta tag to prevent any links being followed.

More Information

To read more about boosting your traffic, try New Webmasters, a website dedicated to helping you build a better website.

Chris Charlton
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/shortcuts-to-quality-backlinks-for-your-website-516218.html

Top 5 list of what not to do when building back links to your website.

Building links to a web site has become a lost art over the years. Recent developments in the Internet Marketing world, like the emergence and development of automated submission programs, the overwhelming amount of black-hat and immoral link building tactics, and other factors has made it appear that, when it comes to search engine marketing, the mentality of “the easier the better” is the right one to have.

This, however, couldn’t be further from the truth.

Google and other search engines do take note of what tactics you or your search engine marketing company are using when promoting your website and attempting to improve traffic and lead conversion. And when they notice things like duplicate content, link farming and spamming for links, and other tactics that have been frowned upon in the past, your site will be penalized. Here are the top of what not to do when building links to your website:

5. Mass directory submissions.

Google and other search engines have all but stated that non-niche directory sites that anyone with an internet connection can submit to are low on the totem pole. Even worse than submitting to them: submitting to all of them at once, all with the same descriptions and titles. If you go the directory route, take the time to make them unique, usually five at a time.

4. Focusing all of your link builidng efforts on blog commenting.

If you’re one of those people who think that only dofollow links matter, then you’ve recently realized that blogs allowing dofollow comments are one of the only resources still available. The amount of “link juice” that these comments is debatable, so focusing ALL link building efforts on this technique can be ill-advised. When you do blog commenting, keep it in good taste. Don’t put a long-tail keyword as the name of the commenter, don’t shamelessly self-promote in the text field, and add something relevant to the conversation. In other words: actually read the post before dropping a comment.

3. Submitting your site to non-relevant sites

You may know plenty of friends and colleagues with websites, but submitting your site to these sites which have nothing to do with your product or service offering would be shooting yourself in the foot. When search engine spiders notice that you’re being linked from a site that has nothing to do with yours, you can be penalized.

2. Focusing all of your link building efforts on Social Bookmarking

This goes back to the mentality mentioned in number four: if everyone can do it, it usually isn’t as effective. There are plenty of sites out there that will help streamline the social bookmarking submission efforts and throw a blog post or article out to a million different social bookmarking sites. Only use the top social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and other trusted bookmarking sites when using this link building technique, and if you use a number of them, change up the descriptions and titles.

1. Buying links

This seems to be Google and other search engine’s ultimate no-no. It is no secret that a number of sites have been penalized dramatically for buying text links on other sites. Stay away from http://TextLinkAds.com and other link brokers, it may seem like you get what you pay for and that others are having success with this method, but if spiders find a footprint to or from your site and it seems like you have bought links from another site or broker, you can be penalized dramatically.

George Murphy III
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/top-5-list-of-what-not-to-do-when-building-links-to-your-site-669180.html

I decided to put together a blog post about traffic because whatever you are doing online you have to get traffic. period. If you are not getting traffic, then there is no way you can monetize off your site. Therefore, I decided to put together a blog post for all you freebie seekers . Some of these techniques you may already know which is great. However, are you applying them? If not then when will you? You just have to stop being lazy and actually apply these techniques .Implement this techniques on your website and make hope to make money online more stronger, Okay, so here is the list, hope you enjoy. If you feel that this blog post will help anyone then feel free to pass it around, but the article must remain in tact the way it is, enjoy.

101 ways to get more traffic

1. Write and submit articles . It is a classic, but it works. This will be indefinite traffic stuck in the search engines for you. Write quality unique articles, not articles that are rehashed or provide no insight to readers, which is a huge problem these days.

2. Write and submit press releases, think prweb after you do one.

3. Write and ping blog entries. Always make sure to link back to your website with your blog posts. Try making multiple blogs and have them all link back to one main site.

4. Make sure your website is listed in: DMOZ : http://dmoz.org/

5. Advertise your website in the appropriate categories at Craigslist. Try posting your ads in the most populated cities in the world.

6. If a niche related forum that you frequently visit allows signatures, then make sure to add your website url in there.

7. Make sure to view related products on Amazon.com. You can try and take some customers from your competitors here by providing your own url if the product is similar.

8. Review websites in your niche on Alexa to try to take some of their traffic by including a reference back to your site.

9. Review some related products on epinion.

10. If you purchase a product that you actually like, then feel free to give an individual respect when respect is due and leave a testimonial. You should be able to get some traffic from that website if your testimonial is left with a url.

11. Whenever you send an email to someone, always add your website url as a signature.

12. Keep updating content on your websites/blogs try at least once per week.

13. Tag blog posts at social bookmarking sites, especially at http://del.icio.us/.

14. Add photos to your blog with appropriate keywords.

15. Tag blog photos at Flickr.

16. Politely ask your readers to subscribe to your rss feeds.

17. Try coining your own term. Might want to trademark it if you smell that it will become popular.

18. Encourage readers to comment on your blogs.

19. Include translation for your websites/blogs, especially in Chinese.

20. Do not be boring, write about something that a wide select of people would want to know about.

21. Make sure to edit your writing (unlike what im doing ).

22. Comment on other related blogs.

23. Make a custom 404-error page for your website. You can provide a link back to your main website or even try to monetize it by offering a related affiliate program within your niche.

24. Sponsor a charity, most charities will link back to your website, and you are also doing a good deed .

25. Sell an item on eBay as a charity auction. Most charities will link back to both your auction and your main website.

26. Start a publicity campaign, do something that individuals in your niche will take note of.

27. Brand your website with a logo and a slogan/catch phrase. Think IBM.

28. Hold a crazy contest that people in your niche will talk about. This will equal more links and traffic to your website.

29. Build a tool that individuals in your niche will love and enjoy. Then give it away for free. If the tool is helpful, then you will get quality one-way links to your website.

30. Contact small newsletters sources offline and submit articles to them.

31. Become friends with editors of an offline publication.

32. Give speeches offline. Start small and local. Also, do not forget to participate in toastmasters meetings in your area.

33. Have a GREAT product. All of the marketing/advertising in the world will do you NO good if your product is sub par.

34. Make something innovative. If you are selling information, what makes your content something you cannot get from the local bookstore, Barnes and noble or even eBay for that matter?

35. Is your product groundbreaking? Will you leave individuals with no choice but to talk about your product or service?

36. Are you selling something that wide groups of people want to know about but there is limited/scarce knowledge?

37. Write good content, if your writing is good then people will share it with their friends. In addition, webmasters will use it as content on their website with a reference back to your article, or at least they should.

38. Spark emotions. If you get people emotional about something then they will most likely talk about it.

39. Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it often.

40. Build a list of subscribers. Your list is like a golden asset to you if utilized correctly.

41. Write tip articles, such as Ten easy tips to blank-blank-blank.

42. Buy traffic from the search engines by utilizing one of their PPC campaigns.

43. Open up a myspace account and find targeted friends so that you can promote your services to them. Do not spam people, myspace is cracking down on spammers and are starting to sue people.

44. Solicit a link from your local chamber of commerce.

45. Have an easy to remember domain name. If your domain name is too long or not memorable then people may forget your site.

46. Add a bookmark option to your website/blogs.

47. Purchase the misspelled versions of your domain name and have it redirect to your main one.

48. Use keywords in your image alt tags.

49. Make sure to include appropriate keywords in your title tag, search engines show more prominence or importance to keywords here.

50. Place appropriate keywords in your anchor text when linking.

51. If you have a profile anywhere online, always include appropriate keywords and link back to your website.

52. Try to get links from websites within your niche with a high pr (pagerank). Some webmasters say that pagerank is not important, but do not listen to them, they have no idea what they are talking about . The more one-way links (inbound links/backlinks) you have to your website, the higher your pr will become. Pagerank is important because websites with higher prs tend to have a higher search results in Google. It is a no brainier that if you can get number one for a competitive keyword then you will have enough traffic that you can handle oh by the way its all free targeted traffic to remind you.

53. Outsource grunt work. Time is in essence money. you can hire individuals at freelance services to send emails, request JV proposals, or to answer questions from prospective or current customers.

54. Offer something for FREE. Abracadabra is not the magic word, FREE is. It is like a worm on a pole for a fish in the water. its bait! Offer a free mini course or free ebook to help collect more subscribers. You can always offer a backend to monetize on this opportunity, such as an affiliate product for example.

55. After someone orders from you offer a one-time offer that compliments your product. For example, if I offered a traffic ebook, then after the individual purchase it would make sense for me to offer a traffic conversion bonus for a limited time only.

56. Become the virus within your niche. Make yourself the bug and have people talking about your product. When people talk about your product then you can induce the viral effect. However, you must give people a reason to talk about you, and being like everyone else is not one.

57. Do your research and find expensive niches to tap into. A good way to do this is to find how expensive someone is paying for a keyword on a PPC search engine. If you can sell items that are more expensive more often then it is a quicker way to get rich .

58. Become an active respected member of niche related forums. You can do this by offering quality posts. Hint Hint, it is not the number of posts you make, it is the quality. Remember, quality or quantity. Many useless or negative posts will have people looking at you funny.

59. Test, test, test. Your flushing money down the toilet if your not testing to see what campaigns are bringing you in the most money compared to which ones are costing you money. When you test, you can eliminate the campaigns that are costing you dollars so that you can properly maximize your marketing efforts. Without proper testing, you are pretty much lost and cant improve. You can only guess to what has or what is working. With proper testing, you do not guess, you know.

60. Stay up to date on what is going on in the world, you can monetize off hot topic trends.

61. Network, when you know more people you can find people that can help you get what you need.

62. Offer an affiliate program for your product or service. Make sure to let your satisfied customers know that you have one, if they like your product then they will be even more delighted to know that they will get money for referring you.

63. Write and give away a free ebook or report. It does not have to be long as long as its quality information neatly formatted and put together. You can also make a brandable ebook or report and allow affiliates the opportunity to brand their affiliate links in there to pass on to the next individual. You can then send this ebook to your subscribers or submit it to ebook directories.

64. Add viral components to your blog such as Social Bookmarking options, and a refer a friend option.

65. Be funny, people like something that will make them laugh and they will spread it for you if it is a genius idea.

66. Syndicate your content by using an RSS feeds on your website.

67. Answer peoples questions on Yahoo! answers with a link to your website in the sources area.

68. Put a link in the about me section of your eBay profile.

69. Make and upload a viral video to you tube. Use appropriate keywords in the video description for your target audience.

70. Record an informative podcast and submit them to poplar podcast directories.

71. Provide helpful answers for Google adsense on their help forum with a link back to your website. Go here to check it out: http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help

72. Get people to comment and add content to your site. When they do this, they will provide you unique content, no need to pay for ghostwritten articles.

73. If you cannot get JVs, then try to bribe webmasters for sponsored advertising space on their newsletters.

74. Include a media section on your website so that you will give the media an easy way to stay up to date on what your company is doing.

75. Try to teach a class at your local community college or university. The more exposure you get in the public, the more credibility you will receive.

76. Make a screensaver and make it easy for individuals in your niche to download it. Have eye candy graphics combined with your company logo to brand yourself.

77. Write something controversial and spread it freely to your target market. It can be something as idiotic as the Da Vinci code, but as long people talk about it, its a successful campaign. A few hints, something controversial is something that goes against established beliefs in your market.

78. Write and publish a book. Having your own book is a quick way to gain credibility.

79. Take a guru in your niche out to lunch, and pay for it.

80. Start an organization or club about something. This can be done online through Yahoo! or Google groups.

81. Volunteer. Donate your time to a good clauseyou can always network with people and form connections at the same time.

82. Get involved in your community and try to run some type of outreach program.

83. Offer good customer service, you may be surprised on how many referrals you get just be having a reliable one.

84. Consider adding a direct mail marketing campaign to your marketing arsenal.

85. Put an ad in your local yellow pages to get some local customers. Yellow pages tend to be more successful then newspaper ads because individuals are looking for a particular service when they are browsing through the yellow pages as opposed to newspapers.

86. Post bulletins in your local supermarket. However, since not everyone may carry a pen or pencil, place your contact information and url on strips on the bottom so that individuals can rip it off and take it with them.

87. Host your own commercial so you can put as seen on TV on your products.

88. Conduct surveys and publish them. These make you appear as an expert in your field of study.

89. Break a record or shoot to be in the Guinness world records for something.

90. Make a sitemap for your website.

91. Use a favicon for your site.

92. Make your visitors more involved in your website. You can help accomplish this by adding CGI scripts to your site.

93. Make sure you have no broken links on your site, and make sure that your website shows clearly in all browsers.

94. Find domain names that get traffic, purchase them, and have them redirect to your website.

95. Spell correctly whenever using keywords in writing.

96. Look at sites related to your niche to try to figure out how they get their traffic.

97. Properly optimize your website for the right keywords.

98. Try to avoid java scripts on your website as much as possible.

99. Do not use frames on your websit.

100. If your website becomes popular and starts getting lots of traffic, try switching to a dedicated server. The longer you site is down equals the more lost visitors you will have.

101. Write a quality 101 article about a steamy topic that people want to know more about in your niche .

Thank you for reading and hope you learned something new, im figuring that you at least learn three things new. It may not seem like a lot but those 3 things can help you out big time.

Check out my site to learn more about starting your own online business and making money online. Make money online from home

Doug Purcell
http://www.articlesbase.com/link-popularity-articles/101-muscular-ways-to-get-more-targeted-traffic-to-your-sitesblogs-today-101316.html

Alexa, which is owned by Amazon.com, gives away a free toolbar that you can download and install in your browser. Alexa is then able to keep track of the sites you visit and compute the traffic ranking of those websites, with a rank of “1″ being the assigned to the most visited site.

If you want a more technical definition, Alexa explains it like this:

“The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on a value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users).”

(http://www.alexa.com/site/help/traffic_learn_more)

In April 2008 Alexa revised its methodology so as to “aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users”. (http://awis.blogspot.com/2008_04_01_archive.html)

How accurately this method reflects the actual surfing patterns of all Internet users is open to question. However, if you bear in mind that by the end of 2005 the toolbar has been downloaded well over 10 million times you will realize why many people still think that Alexa offers one of the best approximations that we have of website ranking, especially for the top 100,000 or so websites.

That is why Alexa remains an important measure of a website’s status and is used as a quick way to assess the popularity of a website by advertisers looking for the maximum exposure for the their money. Websites with a higher Alexa ranking also tend to be trusted more than those with a low ranking, so it is in the interest of website owners to get their sites ranked as highly as possible with Alexa.

Here are some quick and easy tips to help you do that without spending a single dollar!

1. Install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as your homepage.

2. Copy and paste an Alexa rank widget onto your website. You can get the widget code at http://www.alexa.com/site/site_stats/signup. As well as informing your visitors about your Alexa rank, it will also keep Alexa updated about the number of unique visitors surfing your site.

3. Create a customized version of the Alexa tool bar, Then place a link on your site to the download page and invite your visitors to download it. You will also earn Amazon commissions every time a user shops on Amazon via the toolbar link.

4. If you have a Wordpress blog there is a plug-in for Alexa Ranking (wp-Alexa-redirect-0.3plug-in) that you can use.

5. Submit your site to web directories. Although a lot of directories charge a registration fee, you can still find many that are willing to list your site free of charge or in exchange for a reciprocal link. A lot of the webmasters who browse web directories have the Alexa bar installed, so if they click your link it will help your Alexa traffic rank.

6. Become an active participant on Internet marketing and SEO forums. Again, a lot of those forum participants are already webmasters and a high percentage will use the Alexa toolbar when they surf. Place a link to your site in your signature and your rank will improve when any of those people click through.

7. A lot of Asian and Australian websites feature in the Alexa top 100,000 and you can bet that a lot of website owners will have the Alexa toolbar installed, so it makes sense to join social networking sites that are popular in those regions, such as:

* http://www.orkut.com – Orkut is owned by Google and is the second most visited site in India.

* http://hi5.com – Hi5 has an Alexa ranking of 17 at the time of writing this article.

8. Become an Alexa expert and post articles that discuss Alexa ranking and SEO tips. This will attract people to your site who may be interested in downloading your toolbar, or people who have already done so. Either way, it will be good for your Alexa ranking. You could even build a whole category of articles on your website devoted to this theme.

9. Set up a freebie page on your website and post a list of useful tools to attract other website owners to your site. Include another link to your Alexa toolbar download page.

10. Get into the habit of using Stumbleupon and other bookmarking sites to spread the word whenever you post a new article on your website or blog. Set up a group of fellow website owners so that you can have run reciprocal stumbling campaigns for better results.

If you apply these ten quick and easy methods you will definitely see an improvement in your Alexa rank and you should also start to attract more traffic to your site!

Darrell Howell

SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization is the process of designing your website and its content so that it will rank high in the search engine results a user is given when they search for particular keywords related to your business. SEO is important if you want your website to have high page rankings, and Texas web designers can help you design a website that will give you a competitive edge.

There are five useful SEO tools that Texas web designers can use to best optimize your website. Having a SEO designed website has many advantages, and these tools will help increase your website’s overall search engine ranking and bring you more traffic.

RSS or real simple syndication feeds are a simple way to keep your customers updated on your new products, services, or information. Through an RSS feed all your potential customers will receive updates immediately as they occur. Updates are sent to them through a RSS reader which is available for most browsers.

Social bookmarking is another important aspect of search engine marketing. When a user adds a website to their social bookmarking account it is the equivalent to adding a website to their favorites, but with a twist. The difference is that with Social Bookmarking users can share their list of favorites with everyone else on the internet and even rank their saved bookmarks in the order of popularity. Texas web designers can help you utilize social bookmarking to benefit your website.

IPB 9.0 and Webceo are SEO tools that give web designers insight into how search engines rank websites and can be used by Texas web designers to optimize your website. These tools can assist you in choosing the best keywords for your website, analyzing your competition, and validating the HTML on your website. These tools also have other features that can benefit your website.

Sitemaps which are used by Google are another great tool that gives Google a closer look at your website. A sitemap tells Google’s robots exactly where to go on your website to index it instead of it having to crawl through your entire. With a sitemap your website will be indexed more quickly. Google has a handy tool, the Google Sitemap Generator, which will generate a sitemap for you. Texas web designers can help you use this tool and develop your sitemap.

Roboform is the fifth SEO tool. The Texas web designers can help you use this tool so that you get the most out of it. This software is very useful for article, directory, and press release submission of content about your website. It completely automates the submission process and helps manage your submissions. It’s simple and fast to use; just enter your information and click a button. All of your information will be entered into the various directories you choose. Submitting articles and other content that contains a link to your website is a great way to market your site. This tool saves you time and makes the task of marketing your website easier.

Jordan FeRoss
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/the-top-five-tools-for-a-successful-search-engine-optimization-682083.html

When you have a business online, you know for a fact that it will not survive without any traffic coming through to it. No matter what kind of site that you have on the internet, you need visitors in order for you to get your point across or make a sale on a product you are trying to sell. No traffic means no customers to make you any money.

To make really quick traffic, you must pay for it. You can do this by setting up an ad campaign with Google Adwords. Although you will get the quickest exposure out there, you will probably be bankrupt by the time you figure you made your first sale. Even if you were to do the proper keyword research for it, you can still risk a lot of your money. You want to make sure that whatever you put into your business, you should make sure you get it back plus some more.

Today, I would like to walk you through some free ways that you can get online traffic that way you have nothing but straight profit coming into your business. Here are the top 3 ways to get free traffic now:

1. Article Syndication

When you write articles, make sure that you arent trying to sell anything in them. You strictly want to write articles that only pertain to your niche and also try to teach people about your niche as well. People will start to trust you when you are giving them information that you will find handy. Make sure that you have a catchy title that way people will click on your article. Submit your articles to as many top article directories as you can to get more exposure.

When you are submitting your articles, also make sure that you have a link back to your website. The more articles you submit, the higher up your website goes in the search engines.

2. Social Bookmarking

For those of you that do not know what social bookmarking is, it is a website that you can save all of your favorite websites to. People will be able to view your profile to see what kinds of websites that you have saved so that they can save them to their profiles to. You can also get a nice surge of traffic from these types of sites as well.

3. Forums

Search for a forum that is one that pertains to your niche. When you join the forum, search through all the threads to see what kinds of things people are talking about. If you see someone that has an unanswered question, you should answer it if you can and be sure to have your website link in your signature line. You can answer or ask questions, which ever you prefer.

So, you can direct free traffic with articles, Social Bookmarking forums. You will start to notice a steady stream of traffic when all used nicely together.

Ashley McAllister
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/top-3-ways-to-get-free-traffic-online-349339.html

By now you are already much familiar with the concept disruptive innovation that is going on all around you. If you have not noticed it yet, I would like to mention the ubiquitous iPod as an example. Sony’s reign on portable music player that started with the Walkman, an disruptive innovation by itself, was disrupted by a series of new technologies in the form of CD players, mp3 players and then the iPod.

Though the forces of disruption introduced by new ideas and concepts have overturned existing market places and people’s lives in the past several centuries, in the last decade a storm was introduced in the form of World Wide Web. It put its strong foothold on every aspect of modern lives – business, finance, sales, marketing, shopping, communication, relationships, and even crimes. The Web was the most disruptive innovation in the history of human civilization.

The Internet boom was followed by a financial bust for hundreds of companies but it created a pervasive technology that intertwined with everything we do today. It pushed us into the true information society. We are happy to use the Web to check our e-mail and weather before going to the office, do our banking during the lunch break, buy that dream vacation package for a bargain price from an online retailer before heading home in the evening, and occasionally chat with our college room mates using instant messaging after the dinner. We have started replacing more and more of existing technologies that we have used in the past by this all encompassing Net.

Virtual communities and social networking sites emerged in early 2000 (though instances of rudimentary social networking sites can be traced back to the early days of the Web) and the popularity of MySpace proved that we are trying to establish a symbiotic relationship with the Web. This relationship is not with the computer that we use everyday in our works and personal lives. It can be any device that lets us connect to this ethereal system that is all around us. We don’t see it, we don’t feel it but we need it.

We have started using these new breed of sites to establish far reaching connections that would not have been possible in human history before. We contribute to this ever expanding network because we believe in the saying, “I will share my knowledge in return for helpful information from others”. We trade ideas when buying a digital computer or visiting a health specialists and use the collective information and knowledge to drive our actions. Social connections that we establish using these sites help us find jobs, business partners, friends with mutual interests, and even life partners.

For the last 200 years, the Industrial Revolution has provided us the impetus to replace manual labor with machines that do things faster and cheaper. The Industrial Revolution brought societal, cultural and economic changes in human lives. Ordinary persons freed themselves from the drudgery of manual labor for enjoying personal lives.

The Web has brought us the Information Revolution. For the first time, one is able to free herself from the drudgery of many personal chores (e.g. shopping) using the Web. The freed time is spent on getting connected, collaborating, and developing network for sharing information and knowledge. Now, she is able to make decisions using the collective intelligence that was not available before. For example, she is able to order her party supplies from reliable suppliers found in her favorite Social Bookmarking site, organize her party and invite guests using social a networking site, send personalized driving directions for each guest using a mash-up site that uses vCard and road maps, buy that camera, for party pictures, recommended by her favorite collaborative filtering site.

We have started witnessing the emergence of some rudimentary symbiotic intelligence. People are using collective intelligence to their advantages. The Web will provide mechanisms to mine information scattered over databases, documents, web pages, pictures and videos and then collaborate and connect to address users’ concerns. People will further free themselves from the drudgery of going to specialists like financial planners, tax advisors, or even physicians, for obtaining intelligent and reliable course of actions.

The Web itself is a disruptive event in the human history. Each phases of the Web (are we in Web 2.0 phase?) is a natural progression of that disruption. What we have witnessed so far is information stored all over the globe in millions and millions of networked computers and the emergence of user generated contents, collaboration and social connection.

In the next phase we will see the emergence of sites that will be mash-ups of mash-ups, networks of networks, etc. These sites will further free us from some of our today’s daily chores. Besides being cheaper and omnipresent through held held devices, it will provide us the ability to setup semi-intelligent agents that work for us. For example, after work a person will spend 30 minutes using her handheld device connected to a website to configure her party organizer agent that will order supplies, invite guests, and purchase a digital camera using social book markings, networking and collaborative filtering sites. She will be harnessing the collective intelligence of many people to plan her party.

We already use many of the technologies that are required for the maturing of the symbiotic intelligence. We use more powerful cell phones with digital cameras, Internet connections, and the push technology. University and corporate labs are researching intelligent agent technologies. We are enjoying the falling prices of almost all hardware and services. We utilize virtual communities and social networking sites, and we participate in creating and filtering contents.

The central theme of the symbiotic intelligence will still remain collaboration and connection. But the intelligence will not be void of emotions. There will be mechanisms to make us feel good based on our moods, surroundings, and circumstances. Let’s say you setup a dinner date. During the course of the dinner, you feel that every thing is going all right. Based on her likings that you have just learned, your dating advisor agent may suggest a visit to a nearby petting zoo. We have already witnessed the emotional aspect of computing in games where cancer patients wage virtual battles against unhealthy cells.

We are just witnessing the emergence of symbiotic intelligence fueled by the Information Revolution. We will see intelligence evolve from the interaction of experts and non-experts and people will use it to solve their problems. The Web will provide mechanism to harness this collective intelligence to fulfill people, communities, groups, countries and world’s needs.

Deepak Dutta
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/disruptive-web-emergence-of-symbiotic-intelligence-92085.html

Part 2 : Google Adwords Marketing

This is my second article series of Internet Marketing Miracles. Today, we will discuss about Google Adwords Marketing and how it is affecting the whole marketing industry, in general, and the product owners and marketers, in particular.

Advertising in Google Adwords has been the most lucrative form of online advertising never seen since the birth of the Internet. It is instantaneous and you could receive sales minutes after you finalized your campaign. Adwords guru, Perry Marshall, calls it as “the fastest crash course on true, real-life, street-level direct marketing”.

It is the only online advertising mode where you can generate traffic to your website within 10 minutes of campaign, to millions of targeted traffic from a minimum advertising budget of just $5.

Pioneered by Overture (formerly Goto.com, now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing), it was not known to many until Google use this campaign as an advertising medium. Creating campaign is a process and is not for everyone. You need to use some keyword search tool and campaign analysis and techniques in your campaign before you can be successful in this venture.

Google Adwords Defined:

Adwords advertising is a text link ads you can see as “sponsored ads” located at the top or just a text block at the right – of your Google search results whenever you search for some products or services. Also known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, bidders can then bid on a cost per million (CPM) basis for block advertisements. Your advertisement will then be shown to the content network site know as Adsense, the other side of Google advertising model.

When you create a campaign (text ads), you will bid for a series of words or phrases (called as keywords) as your anchor text that will link to your website domain or to your affiliate domain page. Done correctly, you could have a very profitable return of investment (ROI) and when done wrongly, could be very disastrous to your advertising budget. Due to the complexity of this system, most companies are hiring Consultants to do the campaigns for them.

What is Google Adsense?

Google Adsense is a form of advertising medium used by Webmasters to monetize on the contents of their webpages. Blocks displayed could be text, images and recently video advertisements. Adsense are displayed via javascript generated iframes and the text displayed are always relevant to the contents of your webpages. The monetization of your page depends on how well you place the location of your adsense blocks. Although placement plays a vital role in your click-through, color and text font place an important aspect in your campaign. Try to experiment with the background color, font and text colors to achieve the desired click-through campaign and, hence, maximizing your adsense income.

If your niche site is www.aboutdogs.com , Adsense will display an ads relating to your contents, like “dog foods”, “dog grooming ebooks” and, if you specify a targeted country, could even show a “veterinary clinic” near your area. Contextual ads change whenever the content of the page change as well. What makes this advertising relevant is majority of your customers are targeted, that is, looking for real information as per their keywords search.

Using Adwords and Adsense in your internet marketing campaign, when done right, could be very profitable. In my more than a year in online marketing, i have witnessed dozens of ordinary people making a “modest $200 to $60,000″ per month income from digital ebook sales – using Adwords campaign. Selling digital information is very effective using Google Adwords campaign. Why selling digital products are the best home business today? For simple reason, it doesn’t require you to store and send the package. No inventory and no packaging as there are no physical products to attend to. Everything is done in automation. If you’re an Internet Marketer, you maybe aware of this selling strategy.

Adwords campaign is defined by different sets of permutations as follows:

1) Broad Match : Google’s default option. When someone search for online dating, your keyword will appear when someone search “online” or “dating”. It is less targeted than the exact and phrase match. With this type of campaign, you may receive very less click-through and it could drain you advertising budget if you don’t do proper keyword search.

2) Phrase Match : Quotation marks are integrated to emphasize a phrase. When you campaign for “online dating”, your ads will be seen be someone search “online dating” like “adult online dating” but not for “date online” search. It is more targeted than broad match but less effective than exact match.

3) Exact Match : Brackets are used to emphasize the search. When you campaign for [online dating], it will show up on the search without any other terms in the query. It will not show up when someone search for “online dating resources” or “online dating guides”. You will receive the most clicks even though you will receive fewer impressions for this search.

4) Negative Keywords : When your keyword is “online dating” and you add negative keyword -guide, your ad will not appear when someone search for “online dating guide”. You can apply this option at both Ad Group and campaign level.

The concept of Adwords is very simple, yet, very complex and tricky. What you believe is your best campaign could be your worst keyword campaign. So, take time to muster the art of proper keyword marketing, do proper research, take advise, read reports, buy ebooks about Adword guides, implement it, learn from your mistakes and you will see success in the long run.

Jerry Navarro
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/internet-marketing-miracles-part-2-97428.html

AdSense Progress so far, Some of the things I’ve found:

#1. A good AdSense newsletter to start with. The newsletter is full of good content, and I’m sure the book is too, and you can also visit his blog. I haven’t bought the book yet, but plan to once I get in the black. The idea of AdSense is solid, but to be honest, to make the huge gobs of money some people report you have to have lots and lots of traffic (see points # 4, 5, and 6).

#2. There’s been some speculation about whether or not you need an outbound link on your pages. The blog I link above says you don’t need to, but I figure it may not be necessary but might be a part of Google’s algorithm, and at this point I need all the pagerank I can get. The problem with outbound links is you’re providing an exit point for someone to leave your page that isn’t one of the ad units. Additionally, Google has revised its position concerning competing ad programs. So, what I’ve done is registered with Amazon as an associate and placed text-links to relevant items, books, etc on my pages. This way if I lose the visitor by the link I have another shot at monetizing them. I also used the “target_blank” modification on the links so that the links open a new window. This way, I hope, the visitor will still have my page open, if they aren’t interested in what Amazon has to offer.

#3. I’ve been playing around with using article indexes to provide some extra fodder to my sites. Since it’s duplicate content I don’t know if it’ll bring down the pagerank for the entire site or will that individual page get a lower rank, or not indexed at all.

#4. One way to get more traffic to your site is to have more links out there. This way you have higher online visibility, and more quality links will give you a higher pagerank (placement in search engine results). I read somewhere that you should add your pages to various social bookmarking sites. Actually what I read was to add every single page from your site. This seemed like spamming so I just added the index pages from my subfolders. I got an email from Simpy saying that this “self-promoting” was frowned upon and that they would block all my future posts, and my sites as well. I haven’t heard anything from the other social-bookmarking sites so take from this what you will. I think the best alternative, which I haven’t done yet, is to add a small list of icons for these sites for your visitors to add them to their own bookmarks. So that was a mistake, I learned from it, and now you have too.

#5. Contribute to relevant forums. I haven’t done too much of this yet, but I intend to. The thing here is like point # 4. You don’t want to spam. I believe in karma so what goes around, comes around. Forums have members who hate to see spam on their site, they want good relevant posts. It would be very easy for a person on a forum to make a post saying “Hey, this guy wants hits? Lets give him so many hits in so short a time Google will cancel his AdSense account for click-fraud.” Or the forum may just block your account with them, thereby removing your visibility with them. I think they’re an excellent venue for quality links back to your site, say, in your signature, as long as you’re respectfull.

#6. And lastly, contribute articles to those same article indexes. Like the signature field on forum posts, you can include links back to your site in the “About the Author” field of your contribution. Thus, by providing others with a little free content, you can get hundreds if not thousands of links back to your site.

It all boils down to just two things:

1. Original content and

2. inbound links.

I wish you the best of luck with your online campaign, but if you have these 2 things you want need it.

Follow my progress at http://adsenseprogress.blogspot.com/

Ed
http://www.articlesbase.com/link-popularity-articles/making-progress-with-adsense-94466.html

Most people put a website up on the internet, put their website address on all their promotional advertising like business cards, flyers, etc. and then sit back and wait while they fantasize about all the money that will soon be rolling their way. The problem is that the money never comes. So what are they missing? The answer is Search Engine Optimization or SEO. You see, your website has to rank high in order for people to be able to find it among the thousands or hundreds of thousands of competitors you may have on the internet. The following basic terms may help you understand the need for and basics of SEO.

What is search engine optimization?

There are certain techniques and tactics that can help your website get higher rankings. Using these methods with that end in mind is known as search optimization or SEO. One of the most important parts of SEO is including high-quality content on your website. Your content or articles should be relevant to your topic, rich in the right keywords and informative to the reader. The search bots crawl your site and then complicated algorithms are used to rank your site.

What are search bots?

Search bots or spiders are computer programs that scan the content of your website and then relay important information about it back to the search engines. They look for consistency between your Meta tags, titles and keywords. They also check your keyword density, sitemap and other website features.

What is an algorithm?

An algorithm is a complicated mathematical formula that allows a variety of data (from your website) to be used in order to assign a particular value to something. So for your website, the algorithm is going to take a variety of seemingly unrelated factors and can combine them in just the right way to give your website its search engine ranking. The items mentioned above like keywords, keyword density, your sitemap, ease of use as well as other factors like how many backlinks to your site exist on the internet are all taken into consideration.

What is a search engine “ranking”?

Basically, this is what determines how much money your website is going to make. When a person puts a keyword or phrase into an engine like Google, they get back a page of results. Where your website is in those results is your ranking. For instance, the top result in the search has the number one ranking for that keyword. If your site is not on the first page of results the odds of anyone clicking on your site are dramatically reduced.

Hopefully these definitions have given you some insight into the complicated world of SEO. Sometimes it is best to simply hire an SEO expert, especially in the beginning and then you can kind of learn as you earn. SEO is a complicated game, but the rewards are great for those who break the code and remain persistent.

Blake Evans
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/search-engine-optimization-basics-718973.html