SEO Tips - Increase Search Engine Rankings                                   Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3

Increase Traffic To Your Site

So now that you've got your site ranked in the major search engines and started to build up your backlinks, it's time to increase traffic to your site, after all what's the point of having your site online if nobody's gonna visit it? Dependent on how hard you have worked at building your backlinks and how well your site gets ranked with the major search engines, you will probably be attracting a certain number of visitors each day from Google etc. However it's always good to look at alternative ways to increase traffic. As with building backlinks, there's many ways in which you can increase traffic to your site...

Again, there are many 'easy options' out there, like companies promising 5000 visitors for just $30 etc. I know it sounds great, but the reality is that this is a false promise, these companies may attract you a certain amount of traffic, but it will not be the users you want and the ways in which they display your site (pop ups, pop unders etc) will lead to high bounce rates, low page impressions and little to no conversions or sales. However don't dismay just yet, unlike building backlinks, there are good and relatively easy ways to increase your traffic without spending weeks on your computer. The method we will look at here is StumbleUpon...

Using StumbleUpon To Increase Traffic

StumbleUpon is a great web concept that can be utilised to increase traffic to your site without breaking any rules of their site. StumbleUpon is in affect a cross between a social networking site and an online bookmark facility. The greatness of it's concept comes in the way the Stumble facility works, you select the interests that you like and then hit the Stumble button and StumbleUpon will show you a webpage at random that matches your interests. You can then rate this page using the 'I like it' and 'I don't like it' buttons and review facility. Pages that receive high amounts of 'I like it' clicks and good reviews by users will increase in stature on the StumbleUpon system and therefore be displayed more often to users hitting the Stumble button. Here's how this can work for you...

Step One - Sign up for an account and install the toolbar. This is free and takes about a minute. Simply go to www.stumbleupon.com Fill in as many details as you can within your personal profile and add your likes to your 'interests'. Don't just fill in minimal details here as overall, the more you take part in this site, the better the rewards for your site.

Step Two - Build up some stumbles. Don't stumble your own site straight away. This makes it very obvious that you have just come here looking for traffic. Before you stumble your own site, you should hit the stumble button and check out some other sites, if there's any that you like, hit the thumbs up 'I like It' button and these will be stored in your favourites under 'pages liked'. To build up your stature as a user on StumbleUpon it is important to spend time using the stumble facility and add pages to your favourites. The more presence you have as a user on the site the more your opinion will be counted by the system. Therefore, when you stumble your own site, your recommendation will hold more power and your site will be shown to others on a more frequent basis.

Step Three - Add friends. Once you've signed up to the site and started to stumble pages, start to add some friends. This is done by clicking on a person's profile and clicking the 'add as a friend' button. This will make you a fan of this person, they can then choose to become a fan of you making you mutual friends. Building up a strong friend network is vital to get your site more exposure. You can find people by clicking on the people tab at the top of the site, you can then look for people who share your interests.

Step Four - Join some groups. Like any social networking site, StumbleUpon has a number of groups that you can join. Pick some that interest you and sign up. Make a few posts in some of these groups and add more friends from within these groups, it is more likely that these people will become your mutual friend as they share your interests.

Step Five - Finally, now that you have built up a presence on the site and added a number of friends, you can begin to Stumble your own site. This is in affect the process of discovering your site within StumbleUpon. To do this simply go to the page of your site that you wish to Stumble and click the 'I like it' thumbs up button. If no-one has discovered your page yet, you will be asked to submit a review for your page. Take time to describe the nature of the page and add the appropriate tags. Remember that these tags will be used to decide who this page is shown to through the Stumble facility.
One important point to note is that you can only stumble a certain number of pages through your own site, roughly around 10 I believe. Therefore only pick the pages that you feel will make best use of the traffic. Do not stumble all your pages at once as this make things very obvious and may result in less traffic. Instead stumble your homepage first then stumble a few other sites or leave it a day or two then come back and stumble another page on your site. Staggering your stumble's will make your discoveries appear more organic and give them more stature.

Step Six - Restumble your site to keep traffic consistent. Now that you've stumbled your own pages, you should start to see traffic coming to your site from StumbleUpon, both through the stumble facility and through your own and other people's profiles pages. You may even have a few days where traffic goes through the roof, I noticed on two or three occasions that I received over 1000 unique visitors in a day from StumbleUpon, I will explain how to achieve this is more detail in a second. However, to keep traffic coming to your site, you need to keep up the momentum that you have been building up. Therefore, keep using StumbleUpon when you have a spare five minutes and add more pages liked and friends to your profile, this will continue to build your stature on the site. Secondly, try unliking some of your pages (by reclicking the 'I like it' button to cancel your like) and liking some different pages on your site. You'll notice that the chances of achieving high levels of traffic normally occur with newly discovered pages. Spending two or three hours a week on this could guarantee you a steady traffic stream for months to come.

Step Seven - How to Take Your Traffic through the roof. You've seen all the reports on blogs and pages similar to this about how people are receiving thousands and thousands of users from StumbleUpon. In reality it is very hard to maintain such a high level of traffic from the site. However I will be happy to tell you how it can be done, if you have the time and inclination to work at at. Firstly the best way to get your traffic levels through the roof is to get one of your pages onto the 'key pages' of StumbleUpon's site. These key pages are as follows...

1 - The Buzz page also known as Recently Popular Websites (accessed by clicking the websites tab at the top of the site). This is the holy grail of traffic and getting your site on here for any length of time will guarantee you immense traffic.

2 - The Recently popular websites with StumbleUpon users section of the homepage. This is even more fruitful than the Buzz page, although the chances of seeing your site on here are slim to say the least.

In order to get your site onto either of these pages you need to achieve the following...

1 - A high number of people liking your page i.e. people clicking the thumbs up button when viewing your page.

2 - A high number of reviews of your page.

Unfortunately due to the nature of the site this is not an easy task. However there are ways to do this, for example contact other stumblers who have their sites listed and arrange stumble swaps where they review your site in exchange for you reviewing their site (although I believe this is against StumbleUpon's rules). However the key to getting your site onto the buzz page is getting a high number of thumbs up in a short space of time. Therefore if you received twenty in one day, it's likely you might jump up onto the buzz page. Therefore I cannot give any guaranteed way of achieving this. However, I have managed to get this site onto the buzz page twice without really trying, so if you were to put some effort into this you might have some luck.

Overall, you can see that StumbleUpon is a great way of exposing your site to a new audience and increasing traffic without spending any money or investing too much time. I would wholeheartedly recommend the site as a great way of doing this and will continue to use it both to promote this site and to find new and interesting sites. Indeed I have found some of the sites listed in this site while using StumbleUpon. If you have found this guide useful, I would be very grateful if you could click the Thumbs Up button and help me gain a bit more exposure for the site.

Right, now that we've worked out how to get your site more traffic, it's time to look at how you can make some money from your site. Click here to find out how