Don’t get banned

If you read webmaster forums they are generally full of stories from those banned from Adsense by Google for some reason on another, 9 times out of 10 it’s because they didn’t read the Adsense program policies. If you haven’t bothered to read them – do it now. The Adsense policies aren’t just some terms and conditions you should mindlessly agree with – if you get banned you won’t get paid – even if your balance is over $100.

With all that in mind here our tips for not getting banned:

Write a privacy policy

If you’re going to put Adsense on your site you need to write a privacy policy, a document which describes what you do with personal information users may submit or you may collect and log. As of April this year your site’s privacy policy must contain details about Adsense’s interest based advertising and use of the DART cookie. Luckily for those who have little experience writing legal documents, Google has all the details you need to include.

Don’t click your own links

Google is far smarter then a lot of people realise! Don’t click your own ads, whether you’re on your own computer or not, Google’s software can detect fraudulent clicks and if it does you risk being kicked out. You may want to download some adblocking software or disable ads on your site just for you – this is pretty easy for forums and blogs as there are lots of plugins available.

Don’t ask for or encourage clicks

Never ask people to click your links – that includes your friends or family! Using slogans such as “Support us” near Adsense ads is strictly forbidden.

Furthermore don’t try to encourage links by other means – this includes putting misleading images near ads or using other graphics to highlight or direct attention to ads.

Optimize your placement

The placement of ads is very important, firstly place more than one ad unit per page – you can place up to 3 ads on the same page. Be careful not to go too overboard though – if you’ve only got a paragraph of content large banners aren’t going to look too pretty.

Use a mix of ad formats across your websites, this allows your ads to get maximum exposure and helps reduce “ad blindness” – users subconsciously filtering out adverts they’ve seen multiple times. Large box ads and 728×90 leaders tend to do well where 468×60 banners can be much weaker.

Place ads above the fold – that is the part of the page the user can see without having to scroll. Ads to the left also generally perform better (assuming left to right reading).

The final placement tip is to place ads near and around the content but be careful not to confuse users to mislead them. Content around “rich content” – your article body or navigation areas – tend to perform much better as that is where the user is focusing.

Optimize the ads themselves

As a publisher you control which types of ads show – text, image based or both. There is always a lot of debate about which option is better but our suggest is to show both image and text ads. This increases the variation in ads shown to your users which is helpful for repeat visitors.

You can also change the look and style of your ads but this sometimes takes a bit of trial and error in getting the best color palette for your website. Generally you want to use colours already on your site so that ads either blend in the complement the design and content. Depending on your site’s content and audience however, more bright and prominent colours could be better.

Use rotating colours to reduce ad blindness from repeat visitors to your website!

Conclusions

If you follow these simple introduction tips to Adsense you’re going to be well on your way to your first check so good luck!

1. KISS

Keep It Simple, Stupid. You want a domain name people will remember and which will encourage repeat visitors. Whilst bookmarks and history can store URLs for users don’t assume everyone knows how to use them (or even know they exist!). You don’t need to be specific or complicated – sure you can register domains up to 63 characters but who is likely to remember and type it into their address bar?

2. STOP! Get others to check your choice

It may sound silly but your domain name could be utterly ridiculous. Most domains won’t have spaces which means your domain could have more than one meaning. You don’t want to set up a website about pens called Penisland.net or a website to find local therapists called therapistfinder.com, do you? So get your friends, family, clients, people on the street, whoever you can find to check your domain name – not only for things like double meanings but also to see if it sounds good, if it’s memorable – they may have some ideas of their own

3. Still stuck? Don’t be afraid to get help

There are a number of tools which will help you with finding a domain name. They will also tell you instantly if it’s available (the next tip). The most popular appears to be at DomainTools. Just type in your ideas and it’ll come up with some suggestions which you may not have thought of.

4. Check it’s available

Perform a Whois search on the domain to check if it’s available and not yet been taken. A Whois search will also give you more information about the domain – such as if it has previously been used, who owns it if it’s taken and when it will expire if you want to take it.

If a domain has been registered in the past it may pay to do some research about what content was previously on it and how popular it was. If it was used for bad internet practices such as spamming or illegal content you may find it has been blacklisted or marked as spam. It’s not the end of the world but it’ll require more work to get up and running – especially if search engines have blocked it from their index.

5. Don’t wait

Nowadays domain names are ridiculously cheap – which most consider good. Unfortunately this means some companies register lots of domains in bulk in the hope that someone will pay them upwards of £1000 for one or two. So basically: don’t wait around. Once you decide on the domain you want: Register it! You’ll be kicking yourself if you wait a month and find it’s been taken. If you aren’t too sure you may choose to register it anyway – just in case. Most registrars will allow you to return the domain for a full refund for the week after your register your domain.

6. What TLD to pick?

The Top Level Domain (TLD) is an important choice. The TLD is the ending of your domain – be it .com, .org, etc. It seems that everyday there is a new TLD (top level domain) to choose from. This choice may depend on what you plan to host at your domain – .com, for example, is best used for companies. Of course this is also the most popular TLD and most likely to already be taken so try your country code. .co.uk for UK, .com.au for Australia, .us for United states and so on. Not all registrars will be able to supply you with these TLDs and some may require extra steps to register (such as proving you live in the country or region).

As noted earlier though there are increasingly more and more TLDs to pick from – .aisa, .tv and .cc are just a few. This may be good news – you will probably be able to pick your desired choice of domain name. The problem? A lot of internet users are unaware of them. Most will just append a company name with .com or .co.uk and hope for the best. However this will only impact direct traffic from first time users, if you have good search engine rankings this shouldn’t be much of a worry.

With domain names being so cheap though you may wish to buy multiple domains – there’s nothing against it! Why choose between yourcompany.com, yourcompany.co.uk and yourcompany.net when you can buy all 3 for £15? A lot of registrars offer bulk pricing options too. Some TLDs are also VERY cheap – some companies are offering .info domains for as low as 99p.

7. Be aware of trademarks and other companies

So you’ve got the perfect domain, chosen your TLD and it’s not yet been registered – brilliant! But just wait a second – perform a web search on your chosen domain name. It could turn out that your chosen domain name is protected by a trademark or a similar domain name already exists. Whilst neither of these things will stop you from registering your domain name (assuming you don’t do so in bad faith – e.g. in order to purposely confuse users) they are things which should be considered. It may be hard to build up good traffic if there is already a popular domain similar to yours.

8. Don’t forget.

So it’s a year down the line, your domain and website have been a great success, you have plenty of visitors and users but remember your domain needs to be renewed! Some registrars will offer long term (up to 10 years) options however these may not be economically viable and besides, what happens if you change your mind a month later? Sooner or later you’ll going to have to renew your domain. Any good registrar will remind you months, weeks, days even HOURS before it’s too late but once you’ve missed your chance you can be sure your now popular domain will quickly be snapped up.

Directories

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of directories focused around almost every subject you can think about so you’ll always find one relevant to your website. Directories won’t always bring you massive amounts of traffic but they will provide you with a backlink to your site, generally all for free too. It should be noted however that while submission to a few relevant directories is a good thing, submitting to every one under the sun – especially those not relevant to your site’s topic – might do more harm than good.

There are two directories (both free) which you should definitely submit your website to – these are DMOZ and Yahoo. Unfortunately, getting into these directories can be hard and can quite literally take years due to the queues and a lack of editors but do make sure you submit your site anyway!

Blogs comments

Most blogs allow you to provide a website URL when making a comment – this is another easy backlink for your website. A lot of blogs however have the “nofollow” rel attribute added – which means search engines will just ignore it, so for SEO purposes it’s rather useless. There are an ever growing amount of so called “dofollow” blogs and a number of specialist search engines and resources have been created to help you find them.

Forums

When signing up to forums there is also typically a website URL field which can be filled out. Furthermore and perhaps more importantly there is the signature space which can be used to advertise your websites and gain more backlinks. Some forums will be more popular than others and some may require you to meet certain conditions before being able to add a signature, for example collecting 10 posts or being registered for 2 days.

As with blogs some forums may add a “nofollow” rel attribute removing any SEO benefit from your links, however even if this is the case – if the forum is popular and you post around – you should get quite a bit of traffic.

One thing you must make sure you do is respect the forum’s rules, if they don’t allow you to advertise your site then don’t. Spamming and breaking the rules will only lead you and your site to gain a bad reputation and maybe even blacklisted from other forums.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking websites and apps allow users to bookmark and share a URL with either friends or the whole world by making it public and this means an extra back link and hence more traffic for your site. Often very popular links can easily provide tens of thousands of unique users over just a few days.

Again, most of the more popular social bookmarking sites use the nofollow rel attribute and so these types of back links are mainly for traffic – there are, however a number of dofollow social bookmarking sites, see 15+ dofollow social bookmarking sites

There’s nothing stopping you from signing up and bookmarking your own links – just don’t spam – not every one of your blog posts are going to be worth being bookmarked. You can however prompt your own visitors to bookmark pages on your site that they may find interesting, entertaining or informative. Services such as AddThis allow you to very easily insert a ‘Bookmark/Share with’ box on any page of your site. This enables users to add pages of your website to such services with a couple of clicks.

Contributing to websites

We’ve already seen how contributing to both forums and blogs can help you increase your site’s exposure on the web and to search crawlers – well there are heck of a lot more sites around which allow you to add a backlink when you contribute.

Yahoo Answers allows you to add links to sources as you answer questions, be helpful and use your own knowledge and information on your website to answer people’s question in a polite and honest manner, adding a link to your website as the source.

You can create a page on one of many “human edited search engines” such as Mahalo or Squidoo about the niche of your website. Provide information to others and traffic for your site and earn a few dollars from the ad revenue sharing programs while your at it!

You can help create, edit and improve articles about your niche on online encyclopaedias such as WikiPedia and Answers.com. Cite your website as a source (assuming it is, of course) or add it as an external link if it fits in with the article.

That’s your lot!

Hopefully these tips will allow you to increase backlinks to your site and in turn your website’s traffic and search engine rankings. One last tip – make sure to always stick to the rules when adding your own links to other’s sites, you don’t want your domain to be blacklisted so don’t spam!

You can either signup and submit to these sites manually – which could take some time! There are a number of free automated tools which can help make the process quicker. Social Marker is one of those tools which allows to to quickly bookmark links on these sites automatically.

You can also add plugins and widgets to your site to allow your users to submit articles to such sites. AddThis is a popular javascript widget which allows your site’s visitors to share your content on social bookmarking sites, twitter, and by email. If you signup for an account you can also get a tonne of analytics and statistics about how your users are sharing your pages.

The Sociable WordPress plugin allows you to easily add similar links to posts of your WordPress blog.

Without any more blabbering, here is the list, 18 links in total along with their PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking.

One of the most popular and established traffic exchange networks is the named EasyHits4U which this article will be focusing on.

How does it work?

You are given a ‘special url’ which will show you other member’s websites, you are free to surf them in the bottom of the browser window whilst the surfbar provides statistics including a counter and Captcha image. You need to view the each website for at least 20 seconds for it to count as a visit.

EasyHits4U Surf page

In return for surfing websites you are given credits which you can then use to enter your own websites into the system for other members to surf. You can also gain credits by referring new users, winning competitions and being in the top 10 surfers of the day.

Advantages

One of the advantages of the EasyHits4U system is that you get a 1:1 visit ratio, i.e. for every visit you make using the surf system your website will be viewed once. A further good point is that there is a lot of bot protection in place so the visitors to your website will be real, not bots or automated scripts.

Another thing I like about the website is the control over promotion you are giving. When adding your own website into the system there are a multitude of targeting options including the location of visitors you want, the amount of views you want each day and the days you want visitors on.

Targeting options

The referral program is also very in depth providing 5 levels for free users and 6 if you wish to upgrade to a premium account for a small fee. This allows you to increase the credits in your account if you have the ability and time to promote your referral link.

The disadvantages

Like anything in life there are disadvantages. Using such schemes to generate traffic is against the policies of a number of services you may use on your website such as Adsense. Another problem is the quality of traffic, whilst you can be sure visitors will stay around there is no guarantee they will actually being viewing or reading your website or be interested in your website’s content.

One question that popped into my head when I found this website was ‘Is it worth my time?’ If I wanted to get 1,000 visitors to my website I’d need to make 1,000 visits to other websites at 20 seconds a time, that’s well over 5 hours of constant surfing! Now I’m not sure about you but I simply don’t have that time to spare every day so in if you’re looking to get thousands of visitors using such websites you’re going to need to spend most of the day in front of a computer screen.

Conclusions

The core topic of this blog is the discussion of techniques of free online promotion. Will EasyHits4U and other traffic exchange programs provide you with an increase of traffic to your website? Yes. Is it worth it? I’m not too sure. There is no doubt if you are prepared to put a lot of time into the system you will be able to get a lot of impressions on your website but the quality of these impressions is not guaranteed by any means. The biggest problem is that for over 5 hours of work I’d hope for a lot more than 1,000 impressions and there are plenty of other promotion methods to achieve this. The deal breaker for me however is that such a system contravenes a lot of ad networks policies making it harder to monetize your website.

1. Content, content, content

Content is still king. Although you may be able to gain popularity with your current content you are unlikely to be able to maintain it and attract repeat visitors. Keep updating your website with new pages, articles, tutorials, posts or whatever you may host. Plus – keep it fresh! Sometimes the content of an article can quickly become out of date, especially in the area of technology, so return to previous articles and update and republish them. Give your visitors a reason to return, for example you could split long articles or posts into 2 or 3 parts published over a week.

2. Relevant directories and websites

Get your website listed in relevant directories, that is ones related to your sites content! Also attempt to get your site into popular and known general directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo. This may take a long time but it will be worth it.

Setup link exchanges with similar or related websites. This will not only help your pagerank by increasing backlinks but also drive more traffic to your website.

3. Help users find their way around

Users are far more likely to return if they can use your website so make it easy to navigate, get around and find information. Add a search box if necessary – Google can help you with that

4. Make use of social networks

Even if you may not use or like them – make use of them! Add a number of bookmark links at the end of articles, tutorials or even all your pages, there are a number of scripts which make this easy. For bloggers using WordPress there are a number of plugins the most popular of which is Sociable, website owners can use a number of free scripts like the one right here!. There are also a number of free mods for phpBB3 forums such as this one.

5. Keep you website tidy

What is meant by tidy? Well in this context it means avoid content on your pages which may put off users. Such things include music – if you really want to add it make sure it doesn’t auto start! Keep your images high quality but still a small file size. Remember there are still a lot of people using dial up and slow connections. Don’t plaster your website with ads – and make sure you review the content of any ads you do place. Most visitors won’t mind text or image ads however noisy or expanding flash ads can turn people away.

6. Get feedback

This is something a lot of webmasters seem to neglect. If you visit and edit your website daily you will find it hard to spot problems in the design and usability of your website. Ask your visitors to send you feedback and suggestions. You could simply link to a contact form or include a full survey – but whatever you choose make sure to act on the results!

7. Don’t expect users to come to you

This one is especially for new websites. A lot of people will create a website and then have no idea why they aren’t getting any visitors. If users won’t come to you, you should go to them! Visit similar forums and post about your website – make sure to stick to the rules though! Look for related websites and ask them to exchange links. Get involved with your genre – if you’re admin of a movie website, for example, write some reviews of movies you’ve seen and submit them to review sites like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes and of course – your own website! Share your content around. Websites such as Yahoo! answers allow you to help others out by answering questions in multiple categories.

Free hosting

Various companies will provide “free” web hosting – but how do they cover their costs? This can be one of the downsides to free hosting – adverts. Most free hosts will insert adverts onto your pages, these can vary from host to host so it’s best to look at currently hosted sites to see what sort of things they insert. However not every host does this – some require you to take surveys or ask you to post on their forum in order to obtain hosting. There are a few truely free hosts who give you hosting without such restraints although these don’t seem to last that long.

Advantages:

• Free! – Of course the best thing about free web hosting is that it is free – no payments are needed!
• Easy set up – Most free hosts have done all the hard work for you and allow you to easily start a website
• Instant registration – Most free hosts accounts are created instantly meaning if you have a website ready it can be working in minutes
• Updates – Any good free host will add and update software on the system as well as provide ‘one click’ installs for popular software

Disadvantages:

• Free! – Unfortunately the fact the hosting is free is a disadvantage in itself for various reasons. It means:
  • Adverts may be placed on any pages you host on your web space
  • Limits on CPU usage in order to squeeze as many users onto limited servers
  • Restrictions in allowed content – many hosts don’t allow files to be stored and may even delete files after a while
  • They could disappear overnight. It happens – one day the host is fine but the next it – and your web pages – have gone.
• Unreliable – a lot of free hosts are notorious for bad uptime.
• Less space – web space, bandwidth and other hosting specs are generally far lower on free hosts than paid hosts.

Paid web hosting

Paid web hosting offer web hosting services for a monthly cost. There are a great range of prices offered from a few pounds a month to over £100 a month for large dedicated servers. Paid hosting is usually more advanced than free hosting – giving you more control over your web space. Don’t be worried if you are new to the web though as most hosts do provide a simple user interface, file manager and such for new users.

Advantages:

• More space – Most paid web hosts provide far more space – some even claim to offer unlimited space (basically they will just add another 100GB or so hard drive when space becomes sparce).
• More features – SSH, SSL, FTP, Email, MySQL, .htaccess permissions and CGI are just a few features generally only found on paid hosts
• Offers – A lot of paid hosts have teamed up with companies to provide users with offers and discounts such as cheaper software for your website or free advertising using Google AdWords or Yahoo Sponsored Search Results
• Less limits and restrictions – Paid posts generally provide far less limits on server resources

Disadvantages:

• It costs money! – If you’re on a budget paid hosting can be too costly to afford
• Some experience required – Although you don’t need to be the next Bill Gates in order to use paid hosting it can be hard for new users to the web. As mentioned above though any good host will provide a easy to use interface and even web building tools along with FAQ’s and support forums.
• Charges – This is probably the biggest disadvantage – being charged for going over limits. With most hosts it is near impossible to do this but if you do prepare for a large bill! Make sure you read the small print before purchasing hosting to see the rates which you could be charged.

Getting an image

Most affiliate and link exchanges require a small image – typically 88×31 pixels. As most affiliate sections on websites have many of such images its best to make yours stand out. If you’re good with Photoshop or any other graphics package this should be easy, however for those that aren’t there are a number of communities who will happily create one for you either for free or for a few pounds. Some of these forums include:

• FP.net
• DigitalPoint
• TheAdminZone

Whilst it’s best to upload the image to your own server sometimes it may cause a large increase in traffic – remember that the image could well be seen by millions each day if you pick the correct websites. As a result it is sometimes better to use a free image hosting service to host your affiliate image. A few good ones include:

• ImageShack
• TinyPic
• PhotoBucket

Placing affiliates on your site

Remember that this is a two-way system and so you’ll need somewhere to place partners links on your website. You’ll need to put it somewhere so that it’s clearly visible so people will want to affiliate with you, but be sure that it doesn’t interfere with the rest of your sites content. Most of the time it’s best to have a simple table or area on your frontpage or in your websites footer. Here are few examples of affiliate implementations:

Getting affiliates

This is probably the hardest part of promoting your website – getting people to affiliate with you. First of all you want to look for sites related and relevant to yours. This is not only a good SEO technique but it also means you are more likely to get interested traffic.

Once you have found a website the next step is to see if they already have an affiliate scheme or link exchange system – many websites do and will allow you to contact the owner in some way to apply. Other websites may not have such a system in place and you may have to contact the owner directly. Don’t sound desperate and explain to them the benefits of a link exchange between yours and their websites.

It is also a good idea to affiliate with forums and blogs too as these can add a different type of traffic to your website.

1. Friends, family & colleagues

The best place to start off is with those you know – tell them about your new website! Even though they may not be interested in the content themselves they may have a friend who is and will pass on the address of your website. Word of mouth advertising is not only a great way to get traffic to your website – it’s dead easy too! It also has two other advantages: You know that the people visiting your website will be interested in your site’s content. This should mean they will stick around longer and return regularly. Secondly, word of mouth has the potential to reach thousands, if not more, people. Imagine you mention to your friend your new website about cooking. He may tell two friends, who in turn could tell two of their friends, who go on to tell their friends about it. Of course this only works if the content of your website is good – as mentioned at the start of this article – make sure it’s ready go!

2. Posters, flyers, business cards – offline promotion

A surprisingly large amount of webmasters don’t even consider promoting their website offline – well, you should! You’re more than likely to have access to some office or design package, so spend a bit of time creating a few flyers, posters or leaflets about your website to put around your local community. Your workplace, college or town centre will most likely have a notice board where you can place such flyers for free. Be sure to include your websites URL, name and a bit about what it is you offer. A note of warning to not litter or place flyers where they are unwanted – remember that your URL is on it.

If you do however have some money to spare you may want to look into business cards or branding on other items such as clothes, mugs and mouse pads. You can do this very cheaply online nowadays or visit a local printing service.

3. Search engines

So now you start online promotion. The first thing to do is tell search engines about your existence. Chances are they will quickly find you – but it’s best to give them a helping hand. Most search engines will provide a simple form to tell them about your website. It must be noted though that submitting your website does not guarantee that your website will be added to their index. Here is a list of the “Add URL” page of some of the most popular search engines:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Live/MSN search
• Scrub The Web
• whatUseek

It can take months for your website to appear on search engines so don’t expect to see any measurable increases in traffic overnight. In time, however, as more of your site’s content is indexed you should start to see a regular and steady stream of visitors from search engines. Traffic from search engines can be greatly improved however by making use of so called ‘SEO’ techniques. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is a process of increasing your rankings in search engines with the end result being increased traffic.

4. Directories

I’ve never been a great believer in increasing traffic from web directories – but it seems to work pretty well. So what exactly is a ‘web directory’? Well it’s quite simply a database of websites; they may cover a whole range of topics or just focus on one niche. The majority will allow free submission, whilst others may require a small payment. There are two directories (both free) which you should definitely submit your website to – these are DMOZ and Yahoo. Unfortunately, getting into these directories can be hard and can quite literally take years due to the queues. There are hundreds of thousands of other directories though – but do not go submitting to each and every one you come across. Make sure to submit to ones relevant to your site’s content otherwise you may do more harm then good.

5. Forums and blogs

Most forums and blogs allow you input a website URL when you comment or into your signature – make you do it! You may already be a member of many forums or comment on some blogs, it takes a few seconds to add your site URL when making your next comment. Be sure not to spam though as you’ll be doing your website a lot of harm rather than good. In fact, do the opposite – become part of the community, visit and post often and get to know the members. Like with directories though be sure that the forum or blog is relevant to your website.

6. Social bookmarking

I talked about word of mouth earlier in regards to offline promotion – but the same type of thing can be achieved online. There are a number of websites that offer so called ‘social bookmarking’ services. These allow users to bookmark and share a URL with either friends or the whole world. Often popular links can easily provide tens of thousands of unique users in a very short period of time. Whilst you could just stand by and hope visitors bookmark content themselves, you can prompt them. Services such as AddThis allow you to very easily insert a ‘Bookmark/Share with’ box on any page of your site. This enables users to add pages of your website to such services with a couple of clicks.

7. Create a community

A great way of increasing traffic and the popularity of your website is to create a community. Give your visitors a voice. You may wish to add a forum which can be quite easily done using phpBB or vBulletin. You could allow users to comment on pages of your website and give feedback direct to you. Why not open a blog? Again, this can be easily done with free and open source software like WordPress. Going back to the cooking website example at the start of this article – add a poll or two to your website – get visitors involved and interacting with the website.

8. Improve and progress

This is a long term method to increase your traffic but it is one of the best – for you and your visitors. Take feedback from users on board, get reviews, ask friends what they think of your website and improve. No website will ever be perfect but you can keep on trying. A good website is going to have a lot more traffic then a bad one, so make yours damn good! Continue to add content, pages and new features too. Don’t leave the same 10 pages you may have started with.

9. Share your knowledge

Chances are there will be many who want to learn more about your website’s niche – so help them out and share your knowledge. You can sign up to sites like Yahoo! Answers and reply to questions in your topic area – post your website as a source. If someone emails you asking for help, don’t ignore them; help them out as best you can. Write content to help others learn. Here on spyka Webmaster I write tutorials about writing HTML and programming in PHP. Again, going back to the cooking example, there are endless tutorials which can be created about learning to cook.

10. Usability, design and appearance

Even if your content is the best in the world if it doesn’t look good users will turn away – yes, some visitors are that shallow! That being said you also need to balance the design and appearance of your website with usability. You may have a great looking site… but that is no use if no visitor has a clue how to navigate it. Your family and friends come to your aid once more – get their opinion on how easy it is to use your website. Can they find a certain page, or a certain section of the website without trouble? Do they know what everything does?

11. More is always better

Give your users a bit more than they may have been expecting in a page or blog post. They’ll be happy that they read the page or article and will be more likely to return, increasing your traffic. It could be as simple as having 11 tips in a list of 10 or you could offer some sort of freebie – a free download relating to the page content, for example.

Google trends provides a great way for you to see how volumes for search terms change over time and allow you to plan in advance for certain periods of the year. Below is a graph from Google trends for the search terms Christmas, new year and Easter, the search volumes of which all peak at their respective times of the year.

It’s not just holidays that you target though, political events such as elections and sporting events such as the world cup and Olympics too can be targeted:

So now you have some idea of what type of events you can target – the question is how do you target them? Well the answer is quite simple: on-topic, relevant content to that event. If we take Christmas as an example there are literally endless topics to write about in regards to this event. For forums you could create a topic or discussion about the worst Christmas presents people have received. For bloggers it could be a list of your favourite Christmas songs or your Christmas memories. Here is a short list of topics you could write or discuss on your forum, blog or website from the top of my head, I’m sure you could think of a lot more:

• Worst/Best Christmas presents
• Favourite Christmas memories
• Favourite/least favourite Christmas songs
• Christmas decorations
• Christmas TV and movies
• Embarrassing Christmas stories
• Plans over Christmas
• Christmas meals and food

Assuming you have posted your content in plenty of time search engines should have it all indexed ready for the spike in searches for those keywords over the holiday season.