Six ways to boost unique visitors to your website

Getting thousands of website hits is pretty much worthless if they are all coming from a very small number of visitors, says Thomas Christopher. Website traffic alone is not enough. You need to get unique website traffic to attract enough customers.

Website traffic can be measured two ways. Page views or hits are the requests for a page. The web server can easily count those.

Unique visitors are the distinct IP addresses requesting for a page over some period of time. Naturally, this requires keeping the addresses in a data base.

Google Analytics keeps track both of page views and unique visitors.

Counting IP addresses does not always work. Some Internet service providers change the IP address of a single computer frequently.

To gain many unique visitors, it helps to increase the pool from which they are drawn. This you can do by

1. being high in the search engine rankings for various keywords. Presumably, it's not just one person searching for all those keywords over and over again and clicking through to your page.

2. having links to your pages scattered around the web, especially at respected sites. Presumably it is not one person finding the many links to your page and clicking on them.

You can get both simultaneously: the more links to your page, the higher it will be its search engine results placement.

Here are six suggestions for how to generate unique web site traffic:

Tip 1. Post comments on blogs and forums, which include your web site URLs in the signature line. This can bring you click-throughs. It may not be useful for improving your search engine result placement. Too many people are posting comments just to get a back link, so blogs and forums have begun automatically inserting rel="NOFOLLOW" into signature line links. This tells the search engines that the site does not endorse the page, and that the search engine should not confer any extra rank on the page.

Tip 2. Post videos at YouTube or other sites. These must be accompanied by a link in the text description of the video, preferably in the first line so viewers can see and click on it without having to expand the description.

Tip 3. Post pages at Squidoo (called "lenses"). These can contain links back to your web sites. You can include a variety of interactive elements to make the pages more enjoyable for the visitors. You can include the videos you posted at YouTube, which will make the pages more attractive still. You also get to share in the AdWords and other advertising revenue the pages garner.

Tip 4. Publish viral reports -- documents offered free or free for a sign-up containing links to your site -- in hopes they will spread widely over the web.

Tip 5. Submit articles to ezine article directories. The
articles contain links back to their pages in the final "resource box." If the directory publishes the article, the resource box creates back links. If the directory is one of the higher-ranking, more respected directories, that transfers additional importance. Other people get to publish the article for free if they keep it intact. If bloggers use the article, their posts create more back links, and the proliferation over the web gives results similar to viral marketing. Be careful, though, some article directories betray their contributors by using "NOFOLLOW" links in the resource boxes.

Tip 6. Submit ezine articles to directories via Unique Article Wizard, Submit Your Article, or some such services or software. These services submit variations of the article to hundreds of directories and blogs simultaneously. These variations prevent all the articles from being duplicate content, so the search engines may index more than one of them. If they all get indexed, they all contribute to your page rank. (The trick is that you have to supply interchangeable alternative paragraphs.)

To get unique web site traffic, you can spread links to your pages around the web and simultaneously increase your page rank for relevant search terms. We have looked at six ways to do that, all of them free except for the last, submitting to hundreds of directories via article submission services.

Dr. Christopher has created a web site devoted to ezine article submission to improve web site traffic. For information on how to submit articles for free, see http://ezinearticleshow.com/FreeEzineArticleSubmissions.htm For information on how to use one of the article submission services, see http://ezinearticleshow.com/SubmitEzineArticles.htm