Website Traffic Generation in a Web 2.0 World
The proliferation of Social Networking Sites in recent years has led to a completely new wave of website traffic generation techniques. The classic “word of mouth” method so successfully employed for many thousands of years has been given a global twist and an added viral oomph with sites like Facebook, High5 and MySpace.
The premise is very simple. You see something you like and you tell your friends about it - with the added effect that your friends will know immediately what you want the to see and they can go and check out what you have shared instantaneously. Whether this is done through the “Share This Article” button on a news website or you manually copy/paste a website URL into your status to update it is the same. If it is interesting enough and you can make people want to click on it by using the right words then the link you have posted will receive a flurry of traffic - if you take into account friends, friends of friends and the ever expanding network that is part of such a website you can quickly see how potential there is with these types of websites.
However, website traffic generation using Social Networking Sites has another, slightly more cynical way to earn your website traffic generation attempts some more success. This is usually considered the “easy route” but is also considered very taboo. This is using the popularity of such sites to get links to your website. The major way a website is ranked in search engines is via link density. If you have many links - your search engine ranking grows. Due to the aforementioned popularity of sites such as Facebook and MySpace, their links are worth more to a search engine than links from smaller sites that do not have the authority of these giants. You then pay for certain people to put a link to your website on any number of social networking sites that nets you a certain ranking with the current King of the Internet - Google.
However, this technique is flawed in many ways. The first being that you will invariably be caught out. This is a given. Once you are caught out, your IP is flagged as malicious and any credibility is thrown out the window. Subsequent websites that you make, even using different domains, will all be treated with an iron fist. Secondly, and most importantly, due to the iron gloves approach - your website will most probably not be ranked at all for up to a year in Google. There are ways to overcome this, but it is better not to get into such a compromising situation in the first place.
The website traffic generation techniques used by many in this Web2.0 world can be extremely powerful but as with everything, power is a double-edged sword. Website traffic generation using Web2.0 can shift your website from a low level mediocre page to one of masterclass, but it can also ruin your future if misused. Use carefully and you could just be the next big thing…