101 ways to drive traffic to your website

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Search Engine Optimization Process?

As such there is no fix procedure or fix steps for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of a website. Some say follow these 7 steps while some say these are the best 10 steps, but the main point is that all the parameters should be included. According to the work done by me in Shrushti Web Solutions (SWS), I will say that SEO process can be classified into these 7 steps:

1. Keyword Research & Competition Analysis.
2. Website Design, Structure & Link Text.
3. On Page Optimization.
4. Off Page Optimization.
5. Social Media Optimization (SMO).
6. Pay Per Click Campaign (PPC).
7. Statistics Analysis.

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO. Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking sites. SMO includes various fields like RSS Feeds, content base sites, bookmarking & link submission, story & article submission, audio & video submission etc.

SMO can be categorized in following parts:
Content based sites:
There are certain kinds of content that just naturally spread socially. It does not matter what industry you are in and what boring products you sell, there is always some kind of content that can be created that will work. Whether it is creating widgets, making people laugh, or writing a whitepaper, it can be done. Know what type of content can work for you and create it. Help your content travel through RSS, email subscriptions, newsletters, embeds, mashups and e-books. Content bases sites include Squidoo, Kaboodle, Ning, Wetpaint, Newsvine, Newscloud, Likinn, Truemors etc.

Bookmarking & Link Submission Sites:
Everyone's doing it, sharing their bookmarks with the world. Not only is it convent to have all your bookmarks available in one spot, but it also gives your site more exposure. Adding content features like quick buttons to "add to del.icio.us" are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage). Bookmark your way to better business with sites like del.icio.us, which invite users to organize and publicize interesting items through tagging and networking. Bookmarking sites include del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Furl, Magnolia etc.

Story & Article Submission:
Upload stories and articles to drive traffic to your site or blog. Submit items often so that you'll gain a more loyal following and increase your presence on the site. Visitors can submit story and articles and browse articles in categories like technology, business, entertainment, sports and more. Share your favorite sites on the Web with potential clients and business partners by commenting on, uploading and ranking different newsworthy stories and articles. You can also create a member profile that directs traffic back to your company's Web site. Reddit, Digg, and Hugg etc are examples of story and article submission sites.

Photo, Audio & Video Submission:
Media can be an extremely powerful tool in marketing your website. People submit their photos, audio and video that are in a great demand now a days for may be getting popularity, or just for fun, or for money or may be they are promoting something. Videos are in a huge demand now a days specifically for getting reviews on some products. Various companies put out videos of the product that they have reviewed and get popularity & even a brand name. You will also probably be getting a photo or a video in first few pages of google search for something that you might be searching. Youtube, Flickr, Podcastalley etc are examples of such sites.

Social Networking Sites
Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories, and understandings. The social-media sites provide excellent opportunities for businesses to advertise, promote specials, events or services, and feature published, knowledgeable employees. You will surely be aware of the famous word used now a days in india “Orkuting”, and you will surely be aware of various communities on it. This is the way social networking is used to promote business. Facebook , Orkut, MySpace etc are examples of this.

RSS (Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication)

RSS is a way of distributing content information (usually blog/news headlines) as XML format. RSS is also referred to as RDF (Resource Description Framework). Now what‘s XML? It is a flexible text format. This XML file is called an RSS feed. This feed contains information as designated by the site's owner. RSS is used to distribute content to whoever wants it. By requesting the appropriate RSS feed, an end user can quickly find out the latest information posted on a website. An aggregator accumulates RSS feeds for you, and distributes that information to you as you want.
In the end, RSS is about distributing content quickly and easily. It also increases efficiency - instead of having to visit a site every day, by using RSS, you can automate the process and be notified when an update occurs.

How RSS works?

Example 1:

Your name is Mr. Joe, and you are a fan of five different blogs. You also end up wasting a lot of time visiting these blogs. So you turn to an RSS feed aggregator, and add their RSS feeds. Now, once a day (or however often you want), the reader will check the RSS feeds for each site, and notify you when there is an update.

Example 2:

Your name is Mr. Joe, and you live in Britain. You have a little website, and would like to have the latest sporting news on your website. You of course do not have time, so you turn to BBC, and use their sports RSS feed to incorporate sports news into your website.
In order to make life easier for you, each blog entry includes quick links to RSS subscriptions for the most popular tools. This way, while browsing our directory, you can simply click and easily subscribe to a feed.

Affiliate Programs

Advertisers selling goods online can develop networks of ‘affiliates’ that put up banner advertisements or other links on their own websites in return for a proportion of the business generated for each sale, lead, action, or visitor generated. The merchants can offer commission to the affiliates based on each purchase that is made through the affiliates site, or on every visitors that visits merchant’s the site through the affiliate’s site. This is a great way to limit the risk of advertising by only paying for successful sales. One of the name in Affiliate marketing is Amazon which is one of the most successful affiliate program on the internet.

Pay Per Click(PPC)

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites/blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser's website. Its generally use to get instant traffic though your site does not have organic ranking. Advertisers bid on keywords they predict their target market will use as search terms when they are looking for a product or service. When a user types a keyword query matching the advertiser's keyword list, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser's ad may be shown. These ads are called a "Sponsored link" or "sponsored ads" and appear next to or above the "natural" or organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a webmaster/blogger chooses on a content page.

Pay per click ads may also appear on content network websites. In this case, ad networks such as Google AdSense and Yahoo Search Marketing attempt to provide ads that are relevant to the content of the page where they appear, and no search function is involved. PPC engines can be categorized into two major categories "Keyword" or “sponsored match” and "Content Match". Sponsored match displays your listing on the search engine itself whereas content match features ads on publisher sites and in newsletters and emails.

Introduction to E-Marketing

The World Wide Web has provided a great vehicle for marketing for many companies. More and more, businesses are taking advantage of web’s speed, efficiency and cost effectiveness to deliver return on investment from advertising and promotional campaigns not available to traditional media. E-Marketing encompasses many forms of interactive activity and it can contribute to an organization’s overall marketing mix by driving more users to a website, the online shop front and lead to increased website visitation and sales.

Internet Marketing has many names like it is also referred to as e-marketing (or electronic marketing) or online marketing or web marketing. It refers to the strategies that are used to promote a product or service over the Internet. There are some methods to do this like website design & development, its content, link building & reciprocal link exchange, search engine optimization, social media optimization, banners & pop-ups, email marketing, paid inclusions, pay per click, use of blogs, RSS feeds, affiliate marketing etc.

E-marketing does not simply entail building or promoting a website, nor does it mean placing a banner ad on another website. Effective e- marketing requires a comprehensive strategy that synergizes a given company's business model and sales goals with its website function and appearance, focusing on its target market through proper choice of advertising type, media, and design. E-marketing also refers to the placement of media along different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, email marketing and Web 2.0 strategies.

Mission Manager

What is the Mission Manager?

The Mission Manager is designed to help you quickly manage and switch between all of your WebPosition missions and Web pages. By viewing one screen you can see all of the WebPosition mission files and Web pages located in a given folder. At a glance you can see what kind of missions files are available, when they were last modified, or even if a mission is scheduled to run! Even better, you can right click on any mission to run it, schedule it, or just view its last results. For more information see “Using the Mission Manager”.

Using the Mission Manager

1. Missions

The main Mission Manager window displays all of the WebPosition missions in a given folder. The following information is displayed for each mission:

File Name
Domain Name
Scheduled Status
Last Modified
Last Run
Title

Double-click any mission file to open it.

Click the appropriate button to use any of the following functions:

New: Create a new mission file of the same type. You can also double-click New Mission in the main Mission Manager window to access the Create New Mission screen.

Open: Open the selected mission.

Delete: Delete the selected mission and all associated results.

Run: Run the selected mission.

Select Folder: Select a different folder and the Mission Manager will display its contents.

Folder Selection Window
Click the Select Folder button to specify a folder that contains WebPosition mission files. Only folders local to your computer or network can be selected. Folders residing on your Web site can't be selected.

Tip: Click the drop down arrow to access a list of all recently selected folders. This can allow you to switch from folder to folder with ease.

Filter
Click on the drop down arrow to choose a specific mission file type. The Mission Manager will then only display files of that type. For example, choose Reporter Missions from the filter list and only Reporter Missions will be displayed in the Mission Manager window.

Sort By
Click a column heading to choose a sorting option. The Mission Manager will then rearrange the displayed files to reflect the sorting option you chose. For example, to sort by "Last Run," click the heading of the Last Run column. The Mission Manager Window will rearrange the files shown based on when each mission was last run.

Tip: You can also sort files in the Mission Manager window by clicking the top of each column where its name is displayed. For example to sort by Domain Name click at the top of the domain name column where it says, "Domain Name."

2. Web Pages

When tab 2 is selected the main Mission Manager window displays all of the Web pages in a given folder. The following information for each mission will be displayed:

File Name
Size
Last Modified

Double-click any file to open it.

Right-click on any file to access the following menu of options:

Open: Open the selected file.

Open With: Select the program you want to use to open the selected file.

Browse: Loads the selected file in a browser.

Delete: Deletes the selected file.

Critic Analysis: Use Page Critic to analyze the selected file.

Link Check: Use Link Defender to test the selected file for broken links (Professional Edition only)

Folder Selection Window
Click the Select Folder button to specify a folder that contains Web pages. Only folders local to your computer or network can be selected. Folders residing on your Web site can't be selected.

Tip: Click the drop down arrow to access a list of all recently selected folders. This can allow you to switch from folder to folder with ease.

Sort By
Click a column heading to choose a sorting option. The Mission Manager will then rearrange the displayed files to reflect the sorting option you chose. For example, to sort by file name, click the heading of the File Name column. The Mission Manager Window will rearrange the files shown based on their names.

Tip: You can also sort files in the Mission Manager window by clicking the top of each column where its name is displayed. For example, to sort by size, click the heading of the Size column.

What is Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)?

BPO is the act of transferring some of an organization's repeated non-core and core business processes to an outside provider to achieve cost reductions while improving service quality. Because the processes are repeated and a long-term contract is used, outsourcing goes far beyond the use of consultants. If done well, BPO results in increasing shareholder value. The main difference between BPO and more traditional IT outsourcing is that BPO offers companies a way of achieving transformational outcomes much more quickly. In a typical BPO contract, a service provider takes over a specific corporate function. Effective BPO encompasses much more than just changing who is responsible for performing the process. In BPO, the outside provider not only takes on the responsibility to manage the function or business process, but also re-engineers the way the process has been traditionally done.

Benefits of off shoring

The most obvious benefit of offshoring is the low cost. Compared to a U.S. call center, offshoring can save companies up to 50% in operational expenses. But there is more to why people are shipping call centers to countries such as India besides cost. Benefits such as an educated, English-speaking labor pool, low employee turnover, and complimentary time zones all make offshoring attractive.
Let's look at India. India is home to the largest educated English-speaking population in the world. Other than language, the geographical location of India lends itself well to a 24x7 operation. The time zone difference between the United States and India is about 12 hours. This means that a job submitted at 6 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST) reaches India at 6 a.m. and is completed by 6 a.m. PST the following morning. Another positive feature of India is the country's highly motivated workforce. U.S. call centers often experience low morale and very high turnover, usually 40%-70% annually. Considering the time and costs associated with training new agents, it becomes difficult to maintain quality service at a low cost. Currently, Indian call centers have an average turnover rate of 5%. We expect that this number will go up.
As offshoring grows, the cost of labor in India is also rising. Many of the same phenomena that the United States experienced in the early 2000s during the dot-com explosion are happening now in India. The competition for talent is heating up, and salaries are beginning to skyrocket. Employees are constantly looking to increase their salaries and are switching jobs quickly. Increasing salaries, competition for talent, turnover rate - all of these factors will affect the benefits of offshoring.

What do you mean by off shoring?

No commonly accepted definition of "off shoring" exists, and the term has been used to include various international trade and foreign investment activities. Services that U.S.-based organizations purchase from abroad are considered imports. They may also be linked to U.S. firms' investments overseas -- for example, U.S. firms may invest in overseas affiliates as a replacement for, or as an alternative to, domestic production. In recent years, services offshoring has been facilitated by factors, such as the Internet, infrastructure growth in developing countries, and decreasing data transmission costs. Organizations' decisions to offshore services are influenced by potential benefits such as the availability of cheaper skilled labor and access to foreign markets, and by risks, such as geopolitical issues and infrastructure instability in countries that supply the services.'Offshoring' of services generally refers to an organization's purchase from other countries of services that it previously produced or purchased domestically.

Monitor Your Website Traffic

An online business website that depends on promotion and sales needs a good search engine marketing strategy to be successful and profitable. Generating targeted traffic to the website is the main function of a search engine marketing strategy. However, it has been observed that active traffic has seldom proved effective to the concerned websites.

A variety of different traffic building methods and techniques can be used to attract traffic to a particular website. One such widely used methods of search engine marketing that is used by online businesses to generate traffic is “pay per click”. Pay per click is an acceptable method used to attract traffic to your websites, however it is important to monitor it frequently to determine its efficacy in generating traffic that is beneficial to the project.

There are many businesses find paid campaigns prohibitively expensive and a drain on their already scarce resources. Such companies can opt for free campaigns that work on targeted marketing. SEO or search engine optimization is a free traffic generating campaign that is a part of search engine marketing. However, it too requires a lot of research and constant monitoring to produce the desired results. The keywords selected for SEO need to be relevant to the website concerned and also to the users queries. For search engine optimization to be effective in attracting traffic the websites should be listed in the first few pages.

Installing link exchange system is also recommended. In this system you have non-competitive websites link to your websites. This way you generate more traffic to your website from partner websites. Having professionally written articles related to your business also helps, the articles pose problems to visitors and offer your company's name as a solution thereby increasing the traffic. Updating articles on a weekly basis makes your website rich with content encouraging visitors to come back again and again and also visitors are more likely to recommend your sites to their friends and associates, thus increasing the traffic to your website. Distributing your articles throughout the net helps as more and more people are aware of your company's product and thus increasing traffic to your website.

More SEO Tools

No-Follow Finder
Scan a website to find no-follow links to various other sites.

Reciprocal Link Checker
Check multiple sites to see if they are really linking back to you.

Search Engine Position Checker
Check the position of a single site with a single keyword on various search engines.

Site Spider Viewer
Find various SEO statistics and spider information about your site.

Alexa Traffic Rank Checker
View and compare Alexa Ranking graphs.

Meta Tag Extractor
Extract meta-tags information from a web page.

Site Rank Checker
Check PageRank and Alexa Rank for a site.

Domain Whois Retriever
Find out the WHOIS details for your domain.

Browser Details Tool
View your IP address and your browser details.

Source Code Viewer
View the source code of a website.

Search Engine Saturation Checker
Check the number of pages search engines have listed from your website.

Why You Need a Paid Web Hosting

What is Web Hosting?

The service of hosting a site on the Internet making it viewable for other users on the net.

Lots of web hosting service providers are offering identical packages today. And hence it will be difficult for you to choose the right web hosting service for your web site. Choosing the best suited web hosting plan is very important for a smooth running web site. Due to unsuitability in the web hosting plan, one can face losses by decreasing sales, or even losing customers. There are some important factors that have to be considered before buying a web hosting solution.

Web hosting plans that are available on the Internet differ in their pricing. There are some free web hosting plans too. While free hosting plans are meant for personal, non commercial web sites, the paid ones will be good for business web sites. Free web hosting solutions always have certain kinds of restrictions, most unacceptable to any respectable business.

Disk Space or Storage Space Restrictions

As one’s web site is a collection of files being offered on the Internet for viewing, it is necessary to store them somewhere for retrieval. These files are stored in the web servers offered by the web hosting service provider. Most of the free web hosting solutions offer a little storage space (say) 500 Mb or even less than that. This space will not be adequate for a business web site. Even a personal web site with many video and music files cannot be accommodated in so little space. Paid web hosting will let you get the desired server space for your files. If you need more space for storing files you can expand by paying a little extra.

Web Traffic restrictions

Business promotions can cause large amount of traffic flowing to a website. And that’s what the business websites are meant for. However, the free hosting service providers allow only limited traffic to your website. Most of the free web hosts allow 5 GB (max) of traffic to your website. Once the traffic to your website crosses the limit, your website won’t be visible to the public. The paid web hosts allow much greater traffic which is indispensable for business website.

No Tools and Applications

Paid web hosting packages include tools and applications that are needed to tweak or modify a website. The applications will be ready-made and can be used in a website with ease. The tools include virus protection, privacy tools, etc. None of these tools or applications will be available with the free hosting packages.

This is why you need paid hosting for creating a good web site.

WHY SEO (Search Engine Optimizer)?

What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization. The art of making your website relevant and important so that it ranks high in the search results for a particular word.


SEO can make the content of your web pages more relevant, more attractive, and more easily read by search engines and their crawling and indexing software.

Why would this be of great importance to you? Would it be important to you if customers were unable to find your telephone number or find the address of your business? I do not think that many businesses could survive for very long in this situation.

Of course, your current customers and persons already acquainted with your business would be likely to find your web site without difficulty. Wouldn't they?

Are you absolutely sure that your advertising has reached enough potential customers? Did you consider that some people simply do not read the newspapers? How about people who didn't get the issue of the magazine where you placed an expensive ad?

So, what about the search engines? Those people could just enter a few words into a text box, click a button, There is a link to your web site. Aren't search engines wonderful?
Yes, search engines can be wonderful, and the scenario above can happen, but not without some work. This is where SEO comes in.

what is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the art of making your website relevant and important to the search engines so that it ranks high in their results.
The two main weapons in your arsenal are:

Onsite Optimization : optimizing factors on the website that help getting a better search engine ranking

Offsite Optimization : optimizing factors off the website that contribute to a better search engine ranking

What is Google Page Rank?

• Google Page Rank is simply Google's way of displaying how important a webpage is. Google assumes that when 1 webpage links to another webpage, it's actually "casting a vote" for the webpage. The more votes you have for your webpage, the more important your webpage will be.

• Google also takes into account the importance of other website's pages linking to your own webpage. If many webpages link to the website's webpage linking to you (i.e. They have a lot of "votes") then their vote will be of more importance and will increase your Page Rank more.See images below for a visual representation of what I mean...