4 White Hat Techniques

Increase Website Traffic How To - 4 White Hat Techniques
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Kurt_Schmitt]Kurt Schmitt

Methods to increase website traffic are being spun, packaged, wrapped up in e-literature, and sold for a price. Some of these methods work. Unfortunately, a number of them are also known as "black hat" or are borderline black hat and will only work for a short period of time. They'll probably stop working right about the time you buy the ebook, or get around to reading it and trying it out. Since I'm sure you're taking a long term approach to your website, you'll want to dedicate your time and effort to creating a more lasting, and less risky, traffic building model.

While the tricks might work for a while, I'd like to talk about some "white hat" methods that result in lasting traffic. They may not be sexy, and they aren't "secrets" or anything mysterious, but they work. In fact, these methods will work to produce free traffic for many months and years to come.

Article marketing -- There are a number of benefits to using article marketing and other than building pages, it's the number one method I use to increase website traffic. If written correctly, your posted articles will often rank high in the engines and you can end up with several top listings. The article directory sites have a lot of trust and authority with Google, and provide an excellent backlink to your site.

The article directories can send you direct traffic. This traffic is normally very targeted delivering visitors who already trust you and are often warm to becoming loyal visitors and customers. Once your article is published, other websites will republish your article with your backlink. Your job is done as soon as you publish, yet the viral effect created by republishing can live on for years. You can continue to get new backlinks without any further effort.

Making your site delicious -- The best social bookmark is one you don't have to do yourself. You can encourage your visitors to bookmark your pages by placing icons on your site with links to popular social bookmarking sites (such as addthis.com). Bookmarking can dramatically increase the backlinks to your site with minimal effort. In addition, if you bookmark other sites that link to yours, you can improve your rankings in the search engines.

Adding pages -- You can never go wrong by building more content. More pages not only means more value for your visitor, it also means more linking opportunities, more PageRank, and more hooks for the search engines to bite into. The long term result, of course, is increasing website traffic. Many sites will come and go, and it's important to create content so that your site becomes a valuable resource. Content equals staying power.

Social media and community sites -- Many people think of Reddit and Digg, but forget about repurposing their content on other social media sites. Instead of trying to play the very difficult game of who's going to Digg me, you should look at user generated content sites that allow you to post a link to your site. Start with the biggest ones first, as they offer great backlinks and the potential for high traffic. These include Hubpages, Squidoo, and Buzzle, as well as a number of up and coming community sites published on the Ning platform and others.

These are not the only effective white hat methods to increase website traffic, but they certainly work to produce lasting results with no risk. Individually they work well, and in combination they're even more powerful. So forget about those short-lived techniques that might get you banned, and increase your visitor count with these long term strategies.

Kurt Schmitt publishes several Web properties serving thousand of visitors a month, and writes about the benefits of social bookmarking, [http://www.trafficlegacy.com/article-marketing.html]article marketing and other Web promotion strategies. See his website for at least 3 more [http://www.trafficlegacy.com/increase-website-traffic.html]ways to increase website traffic.

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