One way to get better rank and positioning in the search engines is to allow your website to grow over time.

This is, obviously not for a mini-site (created solely for the purpose of selling an ebook) although I have certainly taken a mini-site and grown it into a larger content site behind the sales letter in the past.

Building Value into Your Website

If you are redesigning your website, or growing it for search engine boost and traffic, don’t just add more content on the same topic. Spin off your topic to something closely related and incredibly useful to your visitor.

A few ideas are:

• Add a directory of free offers and products related to your topic. This still brings a a lot of traffic to niche sites. You can include pay-per-lead offers, or cookie-setting affiliate offers, or take it one step further and request a monthly fee from webmasters wanting to submit their free products to grab some of your traffic. You, of course, want to be very careful with what or who you’re linking to in this regard both for your reputation’s and your search engine rankings sake. Finally, to promote your ‘free offers’ page or directory take a few hours and find other free offer sites to trade links with.
• Add definitions and terms pages. Another traffic-puller. Since so many people are still surfing the web for knowledge and information, if your site has a page explaining in detail the terminology of your niche market you will get traffic. Recent experience shows me that just a few sentences per term is no longer enough. You need a few paragraphs of each to gain search engine traffic from this technique. The best part about this technique however is not the gain in search engine positioning, but the increase of value in your visitor’s mind. Your site is obviously the ‘expert’ site on this topic in their eyes.
• Another very important step when you’re growing your site is to take the time during this phase to check every affiliate link. After redesigning Smartzville last week I did this and found that 50% of my year old links to resources and associated merchants led to new offers (and not always related) or websites that were no longer available. Frustrating, but something you want to watch out for more often than annually when you have a high traffic website.
• While you’re checking your outbound links assess every one, once more. For instance if you’re linking out to an ebook (where you make money as an affiliate) and you realize that you’ve never made one sale of that product, dump it. Take time to test and review a new, related product that may convert better. Don’t waste your out-going links or promotions willy-nilly. Concentrate
  on finding the ones that sell and drop the ones that don’t.

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If you’re brand new to website ownership, your site is launched and you’re not getting any visitors or website traffic…

It’s time to tell the search engines your website exists. These numbers are not exact by any means, but depending on your market, 40-60% of all search engine traffic that is sent by any website will come from Google. Yahoo will send another 30-40% and MSN will follow closely behind Yahoo. There are a number of smaller search engines that both humans and the search engine robots use to create listings and links, but these are the big three.

Perhaps the easiest way to generate and ensure a steady stream of traffic is to create your content on a weblog (blog) that you add content to often and that generates an RSS Feed.

Your RSS Feed is your easy pass to search engine submissions. Once a search engine spider or robot knows about your feed, it will follow the links within to your full pages of content and any links from those pages as well. …read more…

Submitting your website to search engine directories is an on-going task that should be revisited bi-annually at least - no matter how well established or aged the site may be.

If your site is new, set aside 20 minutes per week to submit to a few more directories. Most of the directories I’ll point you to are reviewed by actual humans so take care with your submissions and make sure your site is in top shape before you submit it. If you can afford the time and care, your website will see plenty of traffic for years to come.

If you’re short on time don’t buy into software to speed up the process of having your website listed in, and receive traffic from, directories. Although automated submission and software is at time something I suggest, I’d never suggest it to you for something as important as directory inclusion. Therefore, if you’re short on time but have a few dollars to spare, drop into manual directory submissions I have no affiliation with this company but I have researched enough information about paying for submission that I trust this resource to do the job right.

There are a few guidelines for successful inclusion into these directories. First of all your site must offer something of value to your visitors. Websites built solely for an advertising click, an affiliate commission, or that is a one page sales letter likely won’t be accepted. Your website should have the look and feel of an information based resource that includes contact information and a contact phone number.

The first step in submitting your website is to check Google’s Page Rank of the directory (more importantly the category page that your site will be included on). The more PR, the more effort you’ll want to make sure your site is on that page. Many directories carry a PR 5-9, some of which may be transferred to your own pages once included.

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It’s time to switch things up a bit on makemoneywithyourideas.com.

For the next few weeks I’ll be talking about website traffic; getting qualified and targeted visitors to your online business and a few tricks to website promotion.

You know, whether you’re building your site for advertising revenue (you create content and your advertisers pay space to be ’seen’ on your content), you’re building your site for affiliate revenue (you promote other people’s products or services for a commission), or you’re building your site to make sales of your products directly, this same statement applies equally:

The greater number of targeted visitors, the greater your income.

With that said I won’t ever talk about getting any old traffic and I hope you never go down that route! Far too many people sign up for automated hits or traffic exchanges, pay for clicks to and on their website and find that even though their bandwidth went up, their incomes didn’t change one bit!
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