Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

Did you know that there are free ways that you can get
links back to your blog overnight? That after a few days
they can number in the hundreds?

No matter what you market on the internet at some point
you’ll face the issue of increasing the number of visitors
to your site. What most people don’t know is that there are
literally hundreds of ways to get free traffic. Here we’ll
focus on three overlooked ways to get additional traffic to
your site using a blog.

The third most overlooked way to bring traffic to your site
with a blog is to read and comment on other blogs.

Now, maybe you’ve done this before but stopped, because
you’re
becoming concerned about being considered a link-spammer. In
that case, leave a link to your site after your comments,
instead of in the comment form that hot links it.

In the near future, blogmasters will be able to use special
code to prevent spam in their comments section, so this
will become less of a concern.

Besides, getting clicks from people who read comments, or
visits from search engine spiders through your comments,
isn’t necessarily your direct objective, though it’s
definitely a plus.

What you want to do via commenting is to enter the blog
community that corresponds to your target market. Get to
know who the players are and make agreements with them to
cycle traffic between you.

Or lurk to find out where your target market typically
hangs out when they’re online - you’d be surprised at how
many inexpensive and targeted advertising sources you can
find through this method.

(If you’re looking to get linked, there’s another way that
we’ll go over next.)

This tip alone has earned me a few dozen links from
prominent blogs in the past four days alone.

These links are worth ten times a reciprocal link because
they send targeted traffic from established sources, and
come from experts with records of proven results.

You can be sure these kinds of people will check you out
before they linked to you, since they may be judged by the
quality of the information they share.

The second method to more blog traffic is the most
confusing for newer people, and this is probably the reason
its benefits remain overlooked.

In the simplest of terms, Trackback is kind of a remote
commenting system that incorporates linking. It allows the
reader to follow a topic around the web to see other
bloggers remark on the same subject. It enables the
publisher to remotely cite references to the issue on which
they’ve written.

Once you’ve made yourself familiar with the blogging
community you have entered, you can often pick up the pulse
of conversations within your site’s theme. Then, when you
see issues that you want to expound on, you can send the
other site a notification to let them know you cited them
on your blog. That link will appear on their site, and
often draws visitors to you.
Bloggers who use Trackback often enjoy greater control over
this function in their blogs than they do over linking, as
they have the option to reject your reference - so there is
a lesser incidence of fraudulent linking. That also gives
your link a greater chance of being displayed.

So why don’t more people use Trackback?

One reason is that what is arguably the most popular free
blog system, Blogger, doesn’t have Trackback. However,
Haloscan.com can remedy this with their free service - it’s
a cut and paste away.

Many new bloggers don’t get what it is and how it differs
from commenting. And of course, the dynamics of it are a
little more complex than I’ve stated. But learn to use
Trackback properly, and you won’t need to beg for links to
your site ever again.

It’s harder to estimate an exact number of visitors that
come as a result of trackback links. But if you posted five
days out of seven, and was able to get a trackback link to
your site three times a week, by the end of the year you’d
have almost 150 topical links back to your site, which are
more valued by search engines than a typical link trade
with an unrelated site.

The most overlooked source of traffic for a blog is through
article submission. To start with, turn your longer posts
into articles and submitting them to ezines or directories.
Look especially for directories that ask for the direct
link to the article on your own site, and input the
permanent link to the post on your blog.

Make sure that your Auto-Discovery tag is in place and it
can mean hundreds more prospects, links and subscribers.

It’s a shame this is the one of the least used traffic
methods for most sites, let alone for blogs. In four days,
this method generated just over 1000 visitors. 157
newsletter leads, 98 new feed subscribers, and 206 links to
my site. You may not get these same results right away, but
using these simple strategies can still get you more
exposure than you have now.

These aren’t normally the highest quality links, as they
rarely make sure of anchor text. However, bloggers are
citing me using Trackback, sometimes in lieu of linking to
the site where they originally found the article.

To see this in action, do a search on “Can A Ping Really
Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings”, the title
of an article I submitted earlier this week.

That article was published within a week of this one- the
results speak for themselves. Many of these sites aren’t
the ones where my articles are normally published.

There are, of course, plenty of other ways you can leverage
the content in your blog or RSS feed to increase the
traffic to your site. The methods outlined here may be a
bit outside the norm, but, as you’ll soon find, that’s part
of the reason they are so effective.

About the Author:

Still not blogging yet? Don’t quite get RSS? Take the free
course on RSS and blogging at http://www.freetraffictip.com

By Scottie Claiborne (c) 2005

You’ve Got To Pay Your Dues

Many site owners and SEOs are worried because their new sites
that rank well in Yahoo and MSN, aren’t doing well in Google, and
they’re blaming it on the “sandbox.” The current theory is that
new sites are somehow being penalized for obtaining too many
links, too quickly.

Is There a Sandbox?

Is there some sort of link analysis going on; some sort of
threshold that will get links to new sites discounted? It sounds
like a logical possibility. However, many of us who don’t buy
volume links or participate in linking networks are seeing the
same ranking delays. New resource sites with a few good relevant
links are taking just as long to climb Google’s ranks as the
instant link pop sites. I think a lot of people are confusing the
sandbox, with an “aging filter” that appeared earlier this year.

6 Months For Results in Google

I haven’t seen any brand new sites with new domains appear at the
top of the search engine results pages (SERP) since early in
2004. There seems to be a delay of about 6-8 months. I’ve checked
with many site owners and SEOs and I haven’t found anyone who’s
gotten a brand new domain ranked well in Google. If there’s a
magic bullet, no one’s spilling the beans.

What happens is new sites get indexed, they appear for some
obscure queries and they may appear at the top for a week or so,
but then they drop to the bottom of the SERP for several months.
The page shows a PageRank in the Google toolbar, as well as
backlinks. Everything else works fine but it just doesn’t rank
well for any terms in Google. Many times, not even the company
name.

If you have a brand new site, stop driving yourself nuts
wondering what you are doing wrong! Stop tweaking and changing
things, trying to influence your rankings; until the site has
been in the index a while, it doesn’t seem to matter what you do
to it.

Why an Aging Delay?

My own theory is that the age factor for new sites is Google’s
answer to mini-networks and other multi-site strategies intended
to artificially inflate link popularity. Many people divide what
should be a single site into multiple sites in order to
capitalize on the links that are exchanged between them. Others
build a series of small sites that are only designed to add link
popularity to the main site.

By delaying the ranking of brand new sites, the mini-network
strategy becomes more of a long-term strategy than a quick jump
to the top. Site owners who might have started new sites are
going to be more inclined to build new pages on existing sites in
order to avoid that delay.

Plan Ahead for New Sites

If you are launching new sites for clients, make sure you set the
expectation that it is likely to be 7-8 months before the site
achieves any real results in Google.

We used to keep a site under wraps and launch it once it was
“perfect.” Now it makes sense to get a few pages up for your new
site as soon as you complete them. The sooner Google is aware of
the domain, the better.

As soon as you have a domain name, get the hosting set up, put up
a temporary page and link to it from another site in Google’s
index to start that clock ticking.

Subdomains May Avoid the Aging Delay

Pages on subdomains are generally treated as part of the main
domain, making them a possible workaround. If your client has the
option of building their site on a subdomain instead of a new
top-level domain name, let them know that this may avoid the time
delay.

MSN, Yahoo, and AdWords

When launching a new site, if traffic from Google is critical to
your plan for success you need to plan ahead. Get the site out
there and linked to as early as possible and plan to run an
AdWords and/or Overture campaign for a few months until the site
can be established in the editorial results. Yahoo and MSN do not
have this delay built in, so focus your early efforts on these
engines.

Don’t worry, Google will eventually give your new site the
respect it deserves — just give it time.

Scottie Claiborne is the Web Marketing Strategist for
The Karcher
Group and the facilitator of the
Successful Sites Newsletter.
She is a speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences and the
High Rankings Seminars as well as the administrator of the High
Rankings Forum. This article originally published in the
High Rankings
Advisor.