Six Tips to Grow Unique Web Traffic

So what if you get 100,000 hits each month, if they were all by one person? Web site traffic alone is not enough. You need to get unique web site traffic to attract new customers.

Web site traffic can be measured two ways. Page views or hits are the requests for a page. The web server can easily count those.

We can not measure the number of individual human beings visiting the page. For the number of unique visitors, we count the number of distinct IP addresses requesting a page over some period of time, which is easy enough by keeping the addresses in a data base.

Google Analytics keeps track both of page views and unique visitors.

Counting IP addresses does not always work. Some Internet service providers change the IP address of a single computer frequently.

The best way to attract unique visitors is to widen the population from which they come. You can do this by

1. being high in the search engine rankings for various keywords. Presumably, it's not just one person searching for all those keywords over and over again and clicking through to your page.

2. having links to your pages scattered around the web, especially at respected sites. Presumably it is not one person finding the many links to your page and clicking on them.

You can get both simultaneously: the more links to your page, the higher it will be its search engine results placement.

Here are six suggestions for how to generate unique web site traffic:

Tip 1. Post comments on blogs and forums and including web site references in the signature line. This can bring you click-throughs, but its usefulness for improving page rank may be past. Too many people are posting thoughtless drivel just to get a back link, so blogs and forums have begun automatically inserting rel="NOFOLLOW" into signature line links. This tells the search engines that the site does not endorse the page, that is, not to confer any rank on the page.

Tip 2. Post videos at YouTube. To gain any benefit, you have to include a link to your site in the text description of the video. Put it first so viewers can click on it easily. Also end your video with a long view of your URL, although that only gives you traffic from those who are willing to type it in.

Tip 3. Post pages at Squidoo (called "lenses"). These can contain links back to your web sites. You can include a variety of interactive elements to make the pages more enjoyable for the visitors. You can include the videos you posted at YouTube, which will make the pages more attractive still. You also get to share in the AdWords and other advertising revenue the pages garner.

Tip 4. Publish viral reports. Write documents, offer them free for a sign-up, or just for free. Include links to your site. Hope they will spread widely over the web.

Tip 5. Submit articles to ezine article directories. The articles contain links back to their pages in the final "resource box." If the directory publishes the article, the resource box creates back links. If the directory is one of the higher-ranking, more respected directories, that transfers additional importance. Other people get to publish the article for free if they keep it intact. If bloggers use the article, their posts create more back links, and the proliferation over the web gives results similar to viral marketing. Be careful, though, some article directories betray their contributors by using "NOFOLLOW" links in the resource boxes.

Tip 6. Submit articles to article directories via such services as Unique Article Wizard and Submit Your Article. These services submit variations of the article to hundreds of directories and blogs simultaneously. (You have to supply alternative paragraphs that are interchangeable.) Without these variations, all the articles would obviously be duplicate content, and the search engines would index only one of them. If they all get indexed, they all contribute to your page rank.

Spread links to your pages around the web and get unique web site traffic, to get clicks and to increase your page placement for relevant search terms. We have looked at six ways to do that, all of them free except for using article submission services.


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For information on how to buy guaranteed web site traffic or learn about ezine article submission to improve web site traffic, visit the web site created by Dr. Christopher, a Colorado Front Range public speaker.