Brand New Concept Builds Your Web Presence... And Your Traffic

By Ginger Geracitano
Posted Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Some of the best ideas hit me in the process of maintaining my web sites. Let this be a lesson to us all; keep track of your activities so that you can recognize market trends.

Over the past month, I've seen an increase in my site's traffic of over 25%. There is ONE very specific reason for this extra burst of traffic:

Addition of a Site Map

A site map is a page that lists all the available content on your web site. This is a wonderful navigation tool for your visitors to easily and quickly find what they need, but more importantly, it's the best search engine spider food you can offer.

For an example of a site map, check this out: (http://theportaltosuccess.com/sitemap.html)

As soon as I added a site map to my E-Zine's web site, ALL of my articles became listed in the search engines. We're talking Yahoo and Google, here... not some fly by night pay per click engine that nobody uses. These listings account for more than HALF of all my new traffic.

The very first text link on my index page leads to the site map. Once the search engine spiders hit that link, ALL of the pages on the site map get indexed too! This works like magic, with immediate results.

Cost = $0 (zero, zilch, nada!)

While increasing your traffic through the use of a site map is a fantastic tactic, there's something else that I've never seen discussed before.

This *brand NEW* strategy will benefit authors, publishers and anyone else that writes articles as a way of promoting their business.

3 Easy Steps To Creating A *BURST* Of Traffic

1) Go to your favorite search engine and do a web search on the title of your own articles. If you're lucky, you'll see your articles as they've been indexed on sites using them for content.

*This is a great way to make sure your copyright terms are being respected also.

More importantly, once you've searched for the title of your article, you're looking at a listing of potential web masters that would benefit from adding YOUR article to their site!

Think about it. Using your article's title brings up a listing of web sites with the same exact key words. In most cases, this will also mean that the sites have the same target market as your article.

2) Look for sites of high quality. When considering a site to propose your article to, look for their article listing. Do they print the articles of others? If so, it's likely that they will publish yours, too.

Even if they don't list articles that they didn't write, you should still consider them as a possibility. Why?

Targeted marketing, that's why. Remember, your article's title matches THEIR keywords! This is a win-win situation for all involved.

= They get content
= You get exposure
= Their visitors gain information they might not have found otherwise

3) Contact the Web Master of the sites you'd like to have publish your site. If they have a contact form, use it. If they have a forum, join it. Use your article listing page in your signature line, with an offer of *reprint rights*.

If they list a phone number, CALL IT! After all, you have great content for their site that can help THEM gain higher ranking in the search engines.

Quality content that matches their key words. Propose an article swap with these targeted sites, and you're off to a brand new level of web site exposure.

P.S. Don't forget to use a resource box that invites the reader to join your publication.

-- Resource Box -- This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as this entire article, including links and this resource box are unchanged. Copyright 2003 Ginger Geracitano All Rights Reserved. The Portal To Success E-Zine (http://theportaltosuccess.com) Receive Ginger's recommendations that may solve your client's needs: mailto:subscribe@theportaltosuccess.com

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