Tips for building a high traffic website

This article outlines some basic tips for building a high traffic website. ; It also outlines some things that you should not do that could cause some serious setbacks. Key words - Consider what people would search for which may cause them to find your site. Also find out what keywords are the most popular possibly by subscribing to a site that provides keyword popularity information.  Gear some pages to these keywords so long as they are relevent to your material.  Write some pages that would contain these keywords (In headers and other text) but don’t overdue it and keep the material useful. Page ranking and getting links - Google is a very important part of the internet today. They use a computerized page rank system based on links and link structure to compute the “value” of pages. This value combined with the relevance or a search (or how closely your page matches the search phrase in terms of exact matches and number of matches) determines where your page link will appear when a search is done. Getting other webmasters to link to your site is a very important part of getting a good page rank. Suggestions include: Create one or more links pages where other webmasters may post links to their site on your site. Creating a friendly site that makes exchanging links easy encourages other webmasters to post your link. Partner with other sites and work with them to exchange links. Building an affiliates section with links to partner sites may help. Submit to web directories  Once web directories have your site submission most internet search engines will find your site.  It is still good to submit your sites to search engines such as Google, but be sure you do not do it more than once every three months. Building good content will be very helpful in getting links to your site. Content rich – Having a lot of content on your site will not only help improve your page rank, but will provide a better chance of getting page hits when internet users search for information. Also good quality content will keep them coming back  It may be worth your while to give some useful content away for no charge to help build traffic to your site. Getting awards – It is very useful to get awards for a quality or useful site from those sites that give awards. It adds to the prestige of your site and may draw additional customers. Giving awards – Giving awards is a very useful way of getting links to your site from other quality sites since webmasters usually post the award with a link back to your site which can be required. Active content such as discussion boards – On today’s internet active content is a very useful part of bringing people back to your site since many enjoy the free information exchange that is provided by discussion boards and similar tools. Create a site map - This will make sure all your pages can be crawled. Some webcrawlers only crawl a site a limited number of links deep such as 3 or 4 links deep. If you create a site map which is available from a link on your home page it will allow webcrewlers to see all your pages within a depth of two links.  Having a sitemap is especially important if you use framed HTML pages on your site. Be sure all your pages are linked together using HTML links even if users have the ability to navigate to your pages using Javascript or other active programs.  This is because webcrawlers may not be able to count links provided by active programs such as Javascript and this can keep the page rank (for search engines that rank pages) of many of your pages at a lower level than normal. Avoid possibly catastrophic errors – There are some mistakes that could be made which can get you banned from some search engines so don’t do any of the following: Duplicate content on multiple sites can get your page rank penalized. Submitting your site to search engines too often (more than once per three months) could get you banned with little hope of a reprieve. Creating pages with hidden content that readers can’t see but search engines can see can get you penalized or banned. Linking from one site to another excessively especially if the two sites have the same IP address can get you penalized.