Web Traffic Building Tips

In my recent article on traffic building using Flickr, I’ve mentioned that StumbleUpon users love to stumble images as it allows them to adorn their StumbleUpon blog with all their favorite pictures.

Some StumbleUpon users have made photo stumbling into an art form and their blogs feature fantastic collections of meticulously selected pictures, placed alongside poetry and commentary.

This article on photo stumbling will offer some detailed tips on how you can use and optimize your images in order to increase the potential of receiving more stumbles and hence, visitors to your website.

Flickr is a social photography website which allows you to upload and share your pictures with friends and family, registered Flickr users as well as the general internet audience.

Like its closest rival Photobucket, Flickr functions as an image host but its main attraction lies in the social sharing of images with a large community of the interested viewers.

Many amateur and professional photographers use Flickr to showcase their work in return for constructive criticisms from others. Bloggers are also avid users of Flickr because it helps them to save on bandwidth while providing image backup in the unlikely scenario that all their files are wiped out from their servers.

A new project for Search Engine Land, Sphinn is a social website that is designed specifically for search and internet marketing professionals.

Utilizing a Digg-style voting system, Sphinn allows you to share and discuss news stories and articles specifically dealing with topics like search engine optimization and social media/search marketing.

Self-promotion and submission of your own content is actually encouraged. Here’s an excerpt from their submission guidelines:

Yes, you can submit your own stories. In fact, we’d rather you directly submit your own stories you think are of interest to the community than have someone do it for you.

One way to get more search engine traffic is to optimize your website for Google Image Search, a tool which allows users to easily find images by typing in specific search terms, phrases and keywords.

Many people utilize Google Image search to find images for a wide variety of topics, which can range from pictures of cars to celebrities and furniture.

Images can not only make your website visually attractive: they can help you to gain more daily search engine traffic.

Other websites in your niche often hold the key to getting more traffic for your own website. Their collection of traffic sources and links is one that you can appropriate for yourself when you are trying to build more traffic and links.

Assuming that there isn’t a huge gap in topics covered and content quality, websites that link to your competitor will generally be willing to link to you as well.

If the competing sites in your niche are older and more established, their backlink profile might just reveal the traffic sources you need to grow your own website.

Starting a new website is a lot of work. Trust me, I know. Writing content can take a lot of time and energy but the most difficult process of all is to actually build a regular audience.

We all want visitors streaming into the site from early on but unfortunately, things don’t always unfold according to our expectations.

Traffic building can take a tremendous amount of effort but you should know that whatever traffic building efforts you’ve done serves as a foundation for future marketing or monetization plans.

Building defensible or alternative traffic sources for your website allows it to stay afloat, should any search engine algorithms negatively impact the amount of organic traffic you currently or are able to receive.

Following my previous introduction to defensible traffic, this article includes a compilation of 10 overall strategies you can use to develop referral traffic sources for your website, blog or business.

As these methods are generally not niche-specific, you can use them effectively for any type of website or industry. Links to similar articles on these topics are also included at the end of this list.

There is a simple way to increase the amount of daily traffic your blog receives. It doesn’t involve elaborate linkbait articles, contests or advertising.

You don’t need a link from a popular blog nor do you need to pimp your site by commenting aggressively on dozen of other blogs.

In fact, this method doesn’t involve any extraordinary efforts on your part. You don’t need to learn the intricacies of search engine optimization, nor do you need to even focus on networking within your niche.

What is Defensible Traffic? Simply put, defensible traffic is web traffic from sources other than search engines (or Google). These sources can come from offline marketing efforts, traditional media, an established audience base or other online websites.

The benefit of cultivating defensible traffic sources is that you will still receive visitors to your website even if changes in search engine or PayPerClick (PPC)algorithms make it increasingly difficult to get search traffic to your website.

JazzcatSEO has a nice definition of defensible traffic, one which contrasts PPC traffic with an established and well cultivated website.