Well, it’s one of those slow Tuesdays, when my motivation is a bit low, and the list of things I have to do is a bit high. So today I figured I would think about some different ways to drive quality traffic to a website…

1. On all of your content (or product pages) add a “Send to Friend” function, so a user can easily click a button and email a link to your content to someone else. Every time I have added this functionality for a client, they have received many quality hits from people who never would have found the site. This functionality is a MUST for web merchants to have on all of their product pages. Remember, a referral from a friend is the most valuable and credible way to promote your product.

2. Contests are also a great way of driving traffic. The one mistake people tend to make with contests is they do not make the offer (prize) compelling enough. Offer a good discount on your product or service, and you will get people buzzing.

3. How-To’s make great content. Any time you post instruction on how to solve a common problem you’re going to get a lot of inbound links from other sites, and of course, traffic.

4. My father-in-law emails me nearly everyday with a joke or humorous story he found online. This type of content is always good to get people to link to you, or send your link to their friend. Though it does not work as well for merchants, it’s a great strategy for bloggers. If I had something funny to say, I would put it on my blog, but sorry, I have nothing.

Sharing content on the web is a huge opportunity that your site needs to be leveraging. Sites like StumbleUpon, Myspace, Facebook, and others make it easy and fun for users to share content. Make it EASY for your site visitors to either link to your content, or send it to someone. This is the best way to insure lots of buzz and traffic.

I found this statistic interesting. It was taken from a course that SEMPO offers on search engine optimization, though I don’t have the original source.

CONTENT THAT IS SHARED THE MOST ONLINE
Jokes – 88%
News – 56%
Medical Info – 32%

Internal linking is very important to successful search engine optimization. You really have to utilize every opportunity your site offers to use relevant keywords or create a relevant link. Notice I used the word “relevant”! Don’t keyword stuff, and do not create a page full of links.

One place that is often overlooked for good internal linking is the “click here” or “learn more” links. Most sites have them, and they are totally not necessary, and good opportunities to increase the relevance of the page you’re linking to.

For example, let’s say I am linking from my index page on outdoor furniture to a page that talks more about my company. I could do either of these…

Click here to learn more about our company.  OR

Learn more about our outdoor furniture company.

Obviously the second option is going to tell the search engines that crawl the site, the page about us, is about an outdoor furniture company. “Click Here” doesn’t really tell them anything.

Take a look at your pages and see where you can replace some of these plain boring links to something more descriptive and useful.

For a long time the general consensus in the SEO world is that more links were better. In some respects that’s true, but the tables have turned a bit. It’s now more important to have higher quality, industry-specific inbound and outbound links.

There are many services on the net that will help you find link partners, and some of them are good, but some are bad. Since link building takes time and effort, you might as well do it right. Good quality links from good quality websites that have something to do with your website will serve you much better in the end.

I encourage all of my clients to be picky, very picky. In a very real way, your online reputation is at stake! You don’t want links coming in or going out to link farms, or useless directories. Search engines want to see that the links coming into your site are from reputable sites, with fresh and relevant content. I would much prefer one link from an association or other industry site, than 10 links from random websites, regardless of their Page Rank.

You want to win the war, not just the battle, so take the extra time and slow down your linking efforts just a bit. Seek out those high quality links, not just the easy-to-get ones, and you will be well rewarded down the road.