Attracting Visitors to Your Website

Attracting Visitors is a crucial part in the survival of your website. Without visitor traffic, your website might as well be dead to the world because no one will know of its existence. There are however several steps you can take in order to get your websites name out on the World Wide Web and ensure your site is attracting visitors. The good part about it is, most of it's free if you know how to do it right.

Search Engines:
Search engines are ideal for bringing new visitors to your website, but you need to have good natural positioning in order to make a splash and get noticed. Optimizing your website and claiming your spot with natural positioning involves tailoring your site to appeal to search engines. This is also known as Search Engine Optimization, and will be discussed later on as a vital tool to use in any website building scenario.

You can first start to attracted visitors by submitting your websites URL to each major search engine. Do not worry about submitting it to every little search engine you come across. Just concentrate on the large ones, because smaller ones actually use results from the major search engines players.

If you do not already know, search engines have "Spiders", "Bots", or "Web Crawlers",  that scan through web pages for keywords that someone typed into a search box. The more relevant keywords a site has, the better chance it has to being displayed at the top of search results. Once you submit your websites URL to a search engine, you are essentially telling the "Spiders" of that search engine to crawl your site and document the information on it. Once your site has been crawled it may or may not start showing in search results depending on the relevancy of your websites keywords. Some of the top search engines are listed below along with a link to their  "Add your URL"  page.

Bing | Add Your URL

Google  | Add Your URL

Web Crawler  | Add Your URL

Yahoo  | Add Your URL


Blogs and Forums:
Post constructively on other Blogs and Forums that have topics dealing with the content of your website. Most will have signature areas that allow you to add links to your comments so make sure you included a link that refers back to your website. This will not only get your site known to the public, but will help with your sites search engine ranking since you are posting a link on other websites. To get started you can post your websites link on Wizard of the Websites Facebook page or make a constructive post on one of Wizard of the Websites Blog posts. If posting on my Facebook page please include a sort description of your website along with the link so people know what your site is about.

When posting on Blogs and Forums make sure they have the "DoFollow" command set for their website, and not the "NoFollow" command. The "DoFollow" enables search engine bots to follow the link you post back to your website. The "NoFollow" will do the exact opposite and tell the bots not to follow the link back to your site, and in turn, the link will not help your websites Page rank.

There are several different ways you can check if a website is "DoFollow" or "NoFollow", depending on the type of web browser you are using. The easiest way is to download the SEO extension for the current web browser that you use. Once the SEO extension is downloaded and turned on all "NoFollow links will be highlighted, usually with a red background. Below are links for the SEO extension downloading page for different web browsers.

Mozilla Firefox | SEO Extension Download  
Google Chrome | SEO Extension Download

For Internet Explorer, the only way to check if a website has the "NoFollow" command set for a particular link is to view the HTML source code for that site. To do this all you have to do is to right click with your mouse somewhere on the page and choose "View Source". This will open the HTML source code for that particular web page. Once there, hit keys "Control(Ctrl)" and "F" on your keyboard to bring up a search box. In the search box type in one of the links that was listed on the web page to locate its HTML code. If that link is a "NoFollow" link then it should look something like the code listed below.

HTML "NoFollow" link code Example:
Wizard of the Websites
<a href="http://www.wizardofthewebsites.com" rel="nofollow">Wizard of the Websites</a>.

The only part that is important in the example above is "rel="nofollow"". If this part of the code does not say "nofollow" then that means that the "NoFollow" command is not set.

For a complete list of "DoFollow" Forums please visit the Forum Submission sub-page. Remember to always post constructively on these forums. If you are caught for Spam then the administrator of the site will usually delete your posts as well as your account. 


Other Websites:
Contact other websites that may benefit from having a posted link to your site from theirs. See if they are willing to exchange website links with you, so you both can benefit from helping each other out. Stay away from making link exchanges from your competitors websites, they will do more harm than good by possibly taking away your visitors or customers. Just remember, the more inbound links you have to your websites, the more potential visitors you will be able to attract.


Submit Article Comments:
Another interesting way to attract a greater volume of visitors is by writing and summiting articles to other websites that might discuss topics involving the same content that is on your website. This will give you more inbound links as well as make your site more creditable since it is being used as a source for online articles that people look to for accurate information.

When submitting articles, make sure you post your link under your source / citation area for the article in order to get traffic back to your website. The more people that like your article, the more they will follow the link back to your website for more information.

For a great list of websites that allow you to submit articles for free please visit the Article Submission sub-page.


List with Web Directories:
Last but not least you should list your website with certain online directories. These directories are different than the search engines we discussed earlier because search engines focus on the keywords listed in a websites content while web directories are search tool designed to classify websites by subject or category.

Listed below are several large free web directories that you can list your website with. I would stay away from the ones where you have to pay since all you are wanting to do is get your websites name out there. Listed below are a few good / free web Directories to get you started. If you would like to find more directories to list with just do a simple search for "web directory" with a common search engine.

Topsites Web Directory

Dmegs Web Directory

tHE bIT bOT Link Directory

World Website Directory

Free Website Directory

So Much Directory

The Little Web Directory

DMOZ Open Directory

EFreeDirectory

Free Web Directory