4 Secrets For Generating Traffic To Your Website
Boosting Your Business With Words

• Create a home-based business website with one of those do-it-yourself software packages
• Find server space with a reliable company that will host your site
• Turn your site on and start counting your money

Ah, if only it were that easy...but, fortunately, it’s not.

Yes, that’s right - fortunately. Why, you ask? Because if it were that easy to achieve success on the Internet, everyone would be doing it. And if everyone were doing it, then there would be no money to be made. Remember your microeconomics? An increase in supply means a decrease in price...it’s as simple as that. A lot of supply means not a whole lot of money. Okay, enough of the economics lesson and let’s get back to the Internet.

Yes, you’re right. There are people making a good living on the Internet...quite a few, actually. So what do these gurus know that you don’t? Well, for starters they know how to get people to their website. You see it’s not just about constructing a website. Just as important or ( I would argue) even more important is getting people to visit your website. Unfortunately, this is where most people fall short...driving the much needed traffic to their website.

It’s the same argument with traditional “brick and mortar” businesses. You can have the best restaurant, the best clothing store, the best health club, the best anything, but if no one knows about “the best,” they won’t be visiting it and they most certainly won’t be spending any money. The same is true for any online business. If customers don’t know about your site, it’s unlikely that you’ll be selling much of anything to anyone. Especially when there’s millions of other web pages competing for the same dollars as yours.

So how do you drive traffic to your website? The answer is “a bunch of different ways.” That’s why Women’s Work is publishing a series on how to do just that. And the first in the series that we’re focusing on is “Driving Traffic to Your Website...With Articles.”

Now why are these articles, this verbiage so important? In two words...search engines. Despite what many non-search engines would want you to believe, people still find most of what they are looking for using the major search engines. And it’s the natural search listings, not the paid sponsorships or ads, where people are searching for information (I’ll share the studies that prove that out in a future article). Think about your own online behavior. When you’re looking for information on the Internet, where do you go most of the time? Google, Yahoo, maybe MSN? If so, then you’re like everyone else surfing the ‘Net. You probably zig-zag your way through the ads to get to the “real” listings, and if (and only if) you can’t find what you’re looking for, you scan the sponsor ads.

You see, words are the life blood of search engines; it’s what they feed on; it’s what they love and it’s the key to higher rankings with the search engines. The more words your website has (and I mean quality words), the more the search engines will love your website...which brings us back to articles. The more articles, the more words, the more love...you see where we’re going here?

So is that it? Just write more articles, add more content, then start counting the money? Well, not exactly. Before getting started, it's important that you know some items critical to the success of your article-writing campaign.

Create keyword-rich articles
Before you write another word for your website, make sure you understand what keyword phrases people are actually using to search for your particular product, service or business. Why do you want to do that? Because it makes absolutely no sense to guess about keywords when there are ways to find out exactly what the actual phrases are. Besides, if you try to come up with ones yourself, you’ll only get a fraction of what people are actually using. If you’re able to find the most popular keyword phrases, the most competitive, and maybe even identify some phrases that you could easily snatch up first page rankings for with the search engines, wouldn’t it make sense to know what those keyword phrases are?

There are a number of tools on the Internet to help you identify keyword phrases people are actually typing into the search engines. One that we like and use a lot is WordTracker.com. It’s the tool most used by search engine optimizers to come up with the “real” keyword phrases people are searching for. It is very affordable and also has a free demo where you can get started identifying the right keywords for your business.

Another valuable (and free) resource is your own web statistics. Most hosts now provide website traffic reports as part of their standard hosting package. With this web stat software, you can get information about the number of visitors to your website, the most popular pages of your site, general geographic location of your visitors, and (very important) the keyword phrases visitors used to find your website.

#1: Devote one page of content for each keyword phrase
After you’ve identified the keyword phrases that make sense for your website, plan to devote one page of your site for each keyword phrase, For example, if you identify ten (10) keywords or keyword phrases, then you’ll need ten (10) pages for your site. Similarly, if you identify fifty (50) keyword phrases, you’ll need fifty (50) pages for your website...one page of content per keyword phrase.

#2: Optimize your website pages
Now that you’ve identified the keyword phrase for a website page or your next article, include that keyword phrase in various formats and styles that indicate to the search engines that these phrases are important. These styles include –

• Title of the page (words enclosed between the title tags and viewable at the top of the browser)
• Bold or strong
• Italics or emphasis
• Headings (h1 or h2 tags)
• Bulleted or numbered lists (ul or ol tags)
• Link text (the text that describes the hyperlink and is usually underlined)

#3: Theme-atize your optimized pages
The location of your keyword phrases on your web page is important for the search engines to understand what your web page is about. Make sure you include your keyword phrase near the beginning of your verbiage and also at the end. Also, include your keyword phrase in your image “alt” tags. Sprinkle the phrase and variations of the phrase throughout your website page or article but...DO NOT SPAM! That means do not stuff your page with the same keyword phrase over and over again. Include your keyword phrase where it makes logical sense. Use variations of the phrase...plurals, different word order, similar (but different) phrases, In the past, experts emphasized the importance of keyword density (the amount of times the keyword appears in the overall articles), but keyword density no longer seems to be a critical factor.

#4: Build traffic by offering articles to other web publishers
As mentioned earlier, content is critical to the Internet and as a result websites are always on the lookout for good, quality content. And it’s a win-win proposition for both publisher and author. The publisher gets quality content it can share with its visitors and in exchange provides information and a link to the author’s website. To find these publishers, simply search for “article directory”, “article directories”, “announcement lists”, and “ezine publishers” in your favorite search engine. Some of our favorites include:

Sir Look (Google PageRank 5) - http://www.sirlook.com/articles/
The All I Need (Google PageRank 7) - http://www.theallineed.com/submit-articles.htm
BPubs.com (Google PageRank 7) - http://www.bpubs.com/
EzineArticles.com (Google PageRank 6) - http://www.ezinearticles.com/
ArticleCity.com (Google PageRank 6) - http://www.articlecity.com/
and Women’s Work, of course (Google PageRank 6) - http://wwork.com/contact.asp

(Coming soon – comprehensive listing of article directories!)

Note: What is Google PageRank (or PR for short) and why do we include it? In a nutshell, it’s Google’s rating of importance for a website – they give themselves a 10, of course. Without getting into a lot of details, the idea is that it’s better to get links from sites with a high PR value (5, 6, 7) then low PRs or no PR. You can view a site’s PR if you have the Google Toolbar installed on your browser. For more information on the Google Toolbar and to download the plugin, go to http://toolbar.google.com.

Hope this information was of value to you. Now start writing those articles!