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.

As stated in the previous post, your traffic rank is affected by the number of users that visit your website with the Alexa toolbar installed. So the more people that view your website with the Alexa toolbar installed, the higher rank you will get.

All you have to do is to get users that visit your website and those that don’t to install the toolbar. A starting point is to install it on all the computers you may use at home and if possible, your place of work if you use a computer in your job.

You can also install the toolbar on family and friends computers, although you will also need to encourage visits to your website. A tip here is to set it as the homepage so when they load the Internet that will affect your ranking.

Get the Alexa Toolbar here!

If you are using FireFox you can download this extension with Alexa Traffic Rank. This extension also lists Google PageRank.

There that’s it, nothing complicated or time consuming. Just simply install the toolbar to see an increase in rank. I am sure that there are no doubt other methods that allow you to manipulate your sites rank, however this is a simple and easy one.

Rankings are derived from three months aggregated historical traffic data. Rankings are given to top level domains only such as kashdash.com. The address subdomain.kashdash.com would be included in the rank for the top level domain.

What is Reach?

Reach is what measures the number of users and is percentage based. An example would be if Google.com had 29% reach, this indicates that 29% of web users have visited Google.com.

What are Page Views?

Page views is the measure of, you guessed it, the number of pages viewed by a user. If the same visitor visits the same page multiple times in one day it is only counted as one visit.

How can It Help Me?

If you are selling a website and you have a high Alexa traffic rank then you can inform your buyer of this ranking. The higher your rank the more money you can get from selling your website, so any increase in the number is beneficial.

It can also be used to get a rough idea of how many hits competitive websites are receiving. You can then set targets to achieve these.

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Due to issues with my usual blogging computer I am unable to blog as frequently as I would like. I am currently waiting on hardware replacement which is estimated to take about a month.

In later posts I will let you know ways to increase your Alexa Traffic Ranking.