Written by iBotPeaches of iBotModz.net
I would like to give my experiences and opinions on the top 10 best things you can do to increase your website's hits. They will be in order of the least difficult to most difficult possible things to do.
One
Alexa Toolbar.
Alexa is a site that sole purpose is to rank sites from #1 to #5,000,000. As your site hits the top 100,000 Alexa will start tracking incoming and outgoing links, provide daily screen shots and additional features.
http://www.ibotmodz....images1/24463-1
However some people may ask "How are sites ranked?" The answer is by the Alexa ToolBar. Any user who installs it sends information on which sites they visit towards Alexa. Every 48 hours then that gathered information is used to base the ratings. The problem being, only Web Developers install the Toolbar. If anyone installs the toolbar and visits your site then your site rating will increase. You could provide a download to it on your homepage. I urge anyone reading this to click the above link (3 or 4 lines up) and install the toolbar. It simply adds this to Firefox, and is compatible with all majors browsers.
http://www.ibotmodz....images1/24463-2
Two
Google Page Rank
Google Page Rank is a system based on 0-10 with 10 being the best. It ranks how many incoming links and outgoing links you have. Google is a search engine so they send so many outgoing links, and through Google Adwords and Google Adsense receives so many incoming links. With that being around 300 million they get a Page Rank of 2. There are many sites out there devoted to checking the page rank, but then require you to place it on your site, so they can exchange hits to increase their page rank. A good idea, but clutters your site. I prefer Dig Page Rank It is a site devoted to checking your page rank at 20 authorized Google data centers. There is no specific toolbar to help you increase your page rank. Only affiliates will help. Affiliate with any site you know. It doesn't matter if you have 10,000 members and they have 6. Members really never view affiliates its a proven fact. However those exchanged links get you one step closer to an higher page rank. Another great way to increase it is with signatures. Plenty of online sites offer them. Simply add a link like My site It isn't advertising and exchanges links to increase your page rank.
Three
RSS Feeds
RSS Feeds are used so users may receive an instant notification of a new update for any valid RSS Feed. They spread fast and are an easy way to pick up extra customers. They are also good for admins and moderators. With the RSS Feeds available here. I am able to select only a few forums and receive at 1 minute intervals an update on new posts. This is used so I can reply super fast to support topics. Here is my current setup of my RSS Feed.
http://www.ibotmodz....images1/24463-3
Try http://feedburner.comhttp://feedburner.com to read your RSS Feeds, and any major CMS should be able to handle RSS Feeds
Four
Sitemaps
A Site map is a list of all pages on a website. These pages are crawled by spiders or bots. These computers spend 24 hours a day following link after link after link. Upon entering a new web page it traces all links on that site. However is can miss alot. So high end search engines such as Google and Yahoo offer a way to submit your sitemaps. There are plenty of costly programs out there to handle the job, but I have one which is free to use and works great. This one uses 15 crawlers and can crawl one site of 12,000 URL's in under 4 hours.
Here you can see it does daily crawls to update your site with Google. After you have the sitemap, you need to upload it. Google Webmaster Tools is the way to upload all your sitemaps directly to Google. Its quite simple to use and I will not cover it.
With more links submitted to Google, the more times your site can appear in the search results. Its a simple way to gain extra traffic.
Five
Meta Tags
A Meta Tag is like the description you see on Google. Or the keywords you search to get those results. Meta Tags tie directly into crawlers of sitemaps. When any page is "crawled" the "crawler" looks for meta tags. They are usually 3 lines located at the beginning of any page. Like so.
So the bot would grab those tags and use them in searches and use the description for that link on Google. If you use any type of CMS the content of the site is stored in a mySQL database, so there is no way to install Meta Tags. However now there is. Using a variable in the description field and keyword field. Like so.
http://www.ibotmodz....images1/24463-4
Then when the page is visited the post is scanned and keywords and description field is generated. There is plenty of mods for this available for any type of CMS. You just have to search for it. Adding Meta Tags is an invisible change that only is noticed when users search on search engines.
Six
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is a static URL. If you know what a static IP is then you should know what a static URL is. If your on a forum that says &f=89&t=7876&start=7322. That is telling you to go to forum #89 which we can pretend to be Advance SEO Support, and topic 7876, which is a support topic, and to start on post number 7322. So there has been over 7000 replies to this topic. What happens when you link to a specific post and a user deletes his or hers? The URL changes from &f=89&t=7876&start=7322 to &f=89&t=7875&start=7322. So now post number 7875 is no longer that post. It creates havoc when search engines and bookmarks are used. Static URL's take keywords from the post and use it to create a never changing URL. So..
&f=89&t=7876&start=7322 becomes advanced-seo-url/advanced-phpbb3-seo-url-vt1219.html And that will never change (until that exact post is deleted) Most CMS have the option to install it, otherwise it is quite a hassle to install. That is why its our 6 hardest change to complete.
Before: http://www.ibotmodz.net/forum/uploads/remoteimages1/24463-5
After: http://www.ibotmodz.net/forum/uploads/remoteimages1/24463-6
See the difference?
Glossary
CMS= Content Management System
Static= Never changing
Thanks for reading.
This was written by iBotPeaches of iBotModz.net
