The methods are mainly for blogs, however websites can benefit too. Some of the following are just little changes that can be made that will increase traffic in ways you may not of thought. I am not suggesting you use all of them in one go, simply choose ones that suit your blog and work best. If you have any questions about any of the methods, please comment.

1. Have Your Own Domain - Do not use sub-domains at Wordpress or blogger, or use free hosting services. Pay for some blog web hosting or site web hostingand get your own unique domain name. This will make your website more memorable and encourage visitors to return.

2. A Professional and Unique Design - Code your own template or modify an existing theme for your site or blog. What makes your blog so special if it looks the same as 1000 others on the Internet. Your design should be clean and simple so its easy to navigate. Once you have made it, test it and check everything works, a site with errors will loseWeight Exercise visitors.

3 .Content is King – You need to consistently write great content on your blog. The posts that you make need to be worth reading and have some impact on the visitor. If I am visiting your website for the first time I want to be impressed and bookmark your website so I return to see what else you compose.

4. Post Linking – When a link is made to your blog from another blog, if activated, it places a link in that blogs comments back to the relevant post. This will help increase back links to your blog.

5. Personality - Do not pretend to be someone you are not as a blogger. Be yourself and do not pretend otherwise. This is best because your readers want someone to connect with, someone who is a real person and not just a blog with no face.

6. Always Room for Improvement – Always strive to improve your blog any way you can. Play around with ad placement, colours and graphics and other features to make your blog more appealing. Ask for reviews to find area’s for improvement.

7. Reply to Your Readers – This means replying to comments and any e-mails that you receive. This is part of your personality and showing that you are a real person who exists and cares about the topic you are blogging about.

8. Real Posts – Ensure that you sound human in your posts. Do not post in the third person. Use words such as I and talk about your personal experiences.

9. A Picture – A picture paints a thousand words so why not show your readers who is writing the blog. Upload an image of yourself onto your about page, or if you are not quite comfortable to do that then have a cartoon of yourself made.

10. Comment on Other Blogs - This is a very powerful technique, I know I find myself clicking the link to a persons website after I have read their comment and this is what you can achieve by leaving your comment on as many other blogs as possible. Blogs that are about the same topic will help you get targeted traffic.

11. Question Your Readers – Ask your readers questions in posts, this will help to provoke a response from them. You give them an important role to play and they respond by commenting their opinion. This will encourage repeat visitors to respond to your posts with their opinions.

12. Internal Linking – Linking to previous posts that you have made will create more back links and also encourage readers to re-read or look at some of your older work. Readers of a particular post will be interested in related posts so ensure you link to them.

13. Alternate Text Images – When you use images on your site, ensure that you use alternate text “alt” tags to insert keywords or the name of the image. This will help get the images listed on image search engines and result in traffic from that source.

14. Submit to Directories – Submit your site to online directories. Do this to as many as you can to improve your PageRank. This increased back links to your website and there for you receive higher rankings on search engines.

15. Image Use – Try to use images when posting on your blog. These make posts more fun to look at and can break up boring text.

This is the end of part one, check back soon for more ways to increase traffic.

You can go out and get lots of irrelevant back links to your site, however this will not help you very much. You need to get back links to your website, from websites that have similar content and preferably from a page that has a high Page Rank.

You need to get links to your website from websites that are trusted and do not spam or have duplicate content. You need to check if the website has content that is of good quality and is relevant to your site. You should check what type of out-going links the page your link will be on has and ensure that these are of a good quality.

Different types of websites have different types of traffic. You don’t want visitors that are just visiting your site for a second and then leaving. You need quality visitors to your website who are looking for the type of content that your website offers.

You should look for sites that have the do follow attribute because these are the ones that will benefit you the most. Make the most of alt tags if you are placing an image advert or if its a text advert include keywords that are relevant to your website in the anchor text.

I will try and write some posts about link building and provide some places that you can use to create good back links.

1. Asking for Comments

The first thing to try and get comments is to ask for them. Kash Dash doesn’t receive a huge number of hits yet so for those few readers who are loyal, you are welcome to comment

2. Write Something Stupid that is Wrong

I came across this idea of the past few days while arguing a point by commenting. I seldom comment on other blogs however the fact that the guy posting had the facts wrong was enough to provoke a reaction from me to correct him. The continued battle for who was right in the comments sent the number he received very high. So I began thinking, why not just write rubbish…no jokes about by normal content… or get something wrong in a post to try and get that one person who wants the truth to be known

3. Question Your Readers

By asking your readers questions directly you are likely to provoke thought in that readers mind. You comment box is a great place for them to express their opinion.

4. Reply to Comments

After asking your readers a question, its always nice to get a response from the person who wrote the original post. Interact with your readers and reply by commenting. This will increase your comment count and make visitors intrigued to what all the fuss is about.

5. Top Commentors

Kash Dash has a plug-in that shows who comments the most. I have this in the footer of the blog. You might want to implement a similar plug-in. Competitiveness between readers to see who can get the most can only benefit you. …I think.

6. Do Follow Comments

Blogs that provide Do Follow links are increasing popular. The reason for this is due to getting more comments. Do Follow was created to reduce spam in comments, however reverse its purpose and website owners will comment for a free back link. They know that the comment has to look real to ensure its not marked as SPAM so again by having Do-Follow links you can benefit. I used a plug-in for Kash Dash so that these are enabled.

7. Comment on Other Blogs

Ok, now its time to be that webmaster in the tip above. Go and comment on blogs with similar content to yours to increase back links to your website. This will increase your blogs popularity and therefore encourage more comments. Steps 6 and 7 go hand in hand in a sort of loop.

8. Freebies

Everyone wants stuff for free, so take advantage of it. Create a free digital product, ebook, theme, script or whatever and offer it free to the most interesting comment you see in the next month.

Just a few idea’s to help you get comments on your blog, let me know below what you think of the above and how it helps your site.

Great news! Alienware have just introduced a voucher code to be used with their Area-51 m15x notebook. The code is worth 5% off the m15x notebook and is valid from now until Sept 22nd 2008.

Enter the code: AWTDM15X

at the checkout to receive the 5% discount. The Area-51 m15x notebook has been a real hit since its launch and a great product to push as we are heading towards our ‘Back to School/University’ time of the year.

Check here for details

If you want to get your site matched, click here.

Over Selling Resources

A small website will not need many resources, however people are caught in the headlights by large numbers. A large majority of web hosts on the Internet oversell their services. You may have come across plans that include 500GB Space and 2TB of bandwidth, this is overselling. If you were to actually use all these resources I’m sure the host would soon close your account on the grounds of “high CPU usage”. There is no need to get lots of space and bandwidth, simply get what you need at a moderate price.

Resource Limits

Most shared hosting will have resource limitations such as CPU etc. This means that you can only use X% resources for your site for X amount of time. If you are running scripts, check that they can run in the time limits set by the host. You should also check database size limits, and outgoing e-mail limits that may be in place.

You may only be able to have a database up to so many MB. If you have a forum then this is likely to grow and you may need to upgrade so you might want to plan ahead and see how easy upgrades are going to be. E-mail limits may be set hourly which means you can only send for example 200 e-mails an hour.

Reseller Hosts

Reseller hosting makes it easy for anyone to setup a web host. This means you need to check to see how reliable the host is. The last thing you want is a weeks hosting before the person running it ditches their hosting site leaving you with no money and no hosting. To avoid this look for a host that has good reviews from others and is well established. If you are insistent on going for a certain host check how long they have been operating for, if they are a registered business and you may also check there Paypal transaction rating if this is available.

More on Reviews

There are many review sites that you can take a look at, however it is likely that the host themselves have added their website to allow reviews. This also implies that they have the ability to edit and remove reviews that have been left. The best place to get reviews is from existing customers – how obvious was that. Do this by running reverse IP on the hosts IP address. This will allow you to get some of the web addresses on that hosts server.

Hopefully you will not get other sites run by the host so check the WHOIS info to different details and send an e-mail to the site owner asking about the service. You may also want to Google terms such as “hosts name reviews” or “hosts name scam” to see what comes up. Forums are another good place to ask, however if someone simply keeps saying the host is great, check the website URL that they have hosted with the host to ensure they are not just self promoting.

Up time

Up time is very important in hosting and now many hosts have a service level agreement that ensure you receive X% of up time. You may want to use external monitors to see what the up time for a web host is like. The only real way to find the truth is to ask previous customers due to some monitoring sites allowing hosts to remove outages from statistics.

Support

This is one of the most important things in hosting. Check what types of support are available. Do they have Phone, E-mail, Instant Messenger, REAL Live Chat or Ticket Support. If there is a problem with your website you want it sorted asap so ensure that the facilities are there for you to receive help when you need it. Ensure their after sales support is as good as their before sales.

Summary

Always go with a host that has a good reputation for up time, pricing and customer service. New hosts with great deals might to be around for too long due to lack of experience. It only takes one thing to go wrong with a small host that removes their budget for servers so ensure that your host is there to stay.

Those are a few basic things to look out for , more advanced users may wish to check that the server IP is not black listed and that they have a good server infrastructure etc. Browse online to learn more from other customers’ review. Web hosting made easy.