Ten-Step Guide to Boosting Your Site's Traffic and Revenue by: Nadeem Azam

1. Hunt for Catchy Domain Names and Get a Quality Paid Host

You probably have a domain name already, but you might consider getting new ones for different sections of your website or for different target markets. Gone are the days when it used to cost $50 to register a . com and most people can afford to have several domain names. Nameboy is a fabulous free tool to find available names. However, don't register your domain names with Nameboy: they are expensive. Instead, we recommend you use this registrar who charge half the amount.

If you are using a free web host, then ditch it - their intrusive advertising will stop people returning to your site and most directories will not list it. Spend some time at Webhosting Talk, which is world's number one forum for webhosting. There are literally thousands of hosts out there, so it can be an arduous process finding a reliable one which will provide a good level of service. The one we use for most of our sites is here.

2. Put All your Energy into Creating the Best Website Possible

Now its time to create your site or, if you have one already, make it even better! If you need a user-friendly yet advanced HTML editor, we would recommend 1st Page 2000. It is 100% free and far easier to use than the likes of Dreamweaver. Try to make your website look as impressive as possible: it is worth burning the midnight oil to make it look just perfect. We can't stress how important it is to have a professional-looking logo; most webmasters underestimate their significance. In this day and age, image is everything and a jaw-dropping logo will impress potential advertisers. If need be, pay for a graphic designer to create one for you.

3. Write Unique Meta-Tags for Each Page of Your Site

Although meta-tags are no longer as important as they used to be, with search engines like Google and Yahoo no longer using them, it is worth the effort to create unique meta-tags for each and every page of your site. That way you will receive multiple listings in the search engines. An invaluable free meta-tags generator can be found here.

4. Do Some Market Testing and Then Tweak the Site if Necessary

When you have finished your website, ask your friends to surf around it and get their feedback. Big businesses spend billions of dollars on getting consumer feedback on their products and services, but by asking family and friends, you can gain an invaluable insight into how other people will perceive your site for free. You can also ask other webmasters for suggestions on how to improve your site on one of the many forums such as SitePoint or IHelpYou

5. Submit Your Site to the Search Engines

Now comes the fun part. You can either submit your site to the major search engines manually or, to save time, use a submission tool. There are lots of companies which will try to rip you off by asking you to pay to use their submission service, but there's no need to pay a penny. We have spent hours surfing the net to find the best free submission tools for you!If you are pushed for time, you can use either

this or this service which will submit details of your site to various top and middle-ranking search engines. However, we would strongly urge you to spend an afternoon using the excellent SelfPromotion. com to let scores of search engines and directories know about your new fangled creation. A word of caution: never ever use your real email address to make site submissions. Despite what they claim, many of the search engines, particularly the smaller ones, sell the email addresses of webmasters who submit sites to them and you will start receiving more and more spam. Make up your email address or open a new Gmail or Yahoo Mail account and use that when submitting.

6. Don't Forget to Submit Your Site to Directories

The most important directory to submit your site to is Dmoz which syndicates its content to thousands of other portals. Read the instructions about how to submit your site carefully. Yahoo's directory used to be equally significant, but we don't think it's worth the investment any more. Yahoo now gives prominence to its pay-per-click listings and being in their directory will not pull enough traffic to most sites to justify the cost. Yahoo charges an exhorbitant annual fee for a site to be listed in its directory. Alongside Dmoz, don't forget to submit your new-fangled creation to niche directories in your field and in your geographical region. The more links you have to your site, the greater your link popularity and the higher your site will feature in King of Search Engines, Google!

7. Also Consider Pay-Per-Click Search Engines

Free search engine traffic is great, but sometimes it takes months to properly optimize and tweak your web pages until those pages show up high enough in the rankings to do you any good. PPC Search Engines are based on the premise that you, the web site owner or affiliate program promoter, pay a fee to have your site/product listed before others. You can end up paying a considerable amount of money for PPC listings in search engines, but it can provide a valuable source of targeted traffic if you play the game with caution and guile.

Make sure you do your research first to choose the most cost-effective PPC search engines for you. If you do a search at

Webmaster World, for instance, you will discover that many webmasters who paid for listings at Enhance Interactive have considered it a complete waste of money as it partners with poor quality search engines. Other PPC search engines we suggest you avoid are Xuppa (awkward to navigate, poor customer support), Brainfox (terrible control panel) and the European PPC search provider Espotting (very high minimum bid). A couple of PPC search engines we have had a good experience with are this one and this one

8. Optimising Pay-Per-Click Marketing Campaigns

A good way to create a collection of keywords for PPC advertising is to view the source on competing websites. You may do this with as many sites as you want, create as large a collection as possible. Here are some other useful tools to dig for keywords to add to your PPC campaigns: Overture USA and Overture UK toolboxes shows both keywords and traffic; 7Search’s and Google’s are equally good. Patiently build a large collection of search terms. If you only use 20-30 "good" keywords you have to bid high on them and the traffic will be expensive. But if you use hundreds of words you can receive an equal amount of traffic without having to bid high amounts. Also don't forget the landing page people first see when they click on your PPC link must be optimised to generate the sale, sign-up or whatever your aim is.

9. Banner exchanges are a Brilliant Way to Build Your Brand and Traffic

Banner exchanges will allow you to spread the word about your site on thousands of others at no cost. If haven't got a banner, there are hundreds of excellent free-to-use templates at AAA Banners. We have tried over 100 banner exchanges over the years, but most of them seem to be run by amateur webmasters from their bedrooms and, as time progresses and their interest in the project wanes, the level of service deteriorates. The most professional banner exchange we have ever come across is this one. We receive hundreds of visitors from them every day. If you decide to give them a go, spend time getting to learn how to target your banner(s). That way they will only appear on sites in your category and you receive more traffic back to your site.

10. And Finally, the $$$s. . .

It's only when you have finished promoting your site that you should consider adding prominent advertising to it. If, say, you have in-your-face affiliate links from the start, directories are more likely to reject your site. Therefore wait until your site has been included in directories, accepted by PPC search engines and banner exchanges, before adding banners and text links to the top of your pages.

When looking for merchants to promote, avoid the ones that merely pay a one-off lead or sales commission. Most of the wealthiest people in society can enjoy a high standard of living because they have residual income streams: they don't work 100 hours a week to pay for their Mercedes cars. Therefore look for stores that pay you commission for each and every purchase a customer you send to them makes - even if it is years down the line. Visit Azam. biz's directory for the best companies to consider partnering with.

Author:
Nadeem Azam

About the Author:
Article by Nadeem Azam - URL: telecom.Azam.biz