Increasing traffic of a website

Increase traffic to a site is the mantra of success in the web. The more traffic comes to the site, the greater is the monetization capability. It's also a big business at the moment. But is it easy to increase the traffic to a site? I thought so and I tried too many things, but I would say that it is still a black art for me.

I have launched couple of sites and the earning was not the purpose. As I used to do workshops and trainings, I found it a easy way to share the things online. All the tutorials including videos were
loaded on the site. They say curiosity kills the cat and somehow I got initiated to all the AdSense and analytics business. It started with some trickling pennies and it became a self sustaining hallucination. Though I learnt also a lot on the way, but I would say that it's a tough world and I am still fighting. . 

The AdSense figure everyday slaps in the face. It's like a stock market ticker which holds you in suspense game for every 15 minutes, the span in which it gets updated. In the initial days, I would almost remain hooked to it and would refresh the screen so many times, in hope that someone at some corner of the world has clicked an ad on my site.

Let me outline some of the things I learned on the way:

• Hiring SEO service : I never did that as I was not so much interested in monetization. Also I am still not sure if SEO services can provide a durable solution. There are too many black practices happening out there. They charge upfront and at times hit your website through proxies with different IP and you will be happy to see the traffic increasing in leaps and bounds, but than it dies down with leaps and bounds also. I am not sure if people really understand what SEO means. Some of the things that makes sense to me are as follows. But these are anyway good practices.
  • Making optimized applications which means serving  js  and css as downloadable  files so that they can be cached.  Caching the content both at server and browser as much as possible.
  • Giving relevant keywords in meta tags and title.
  • Writing for human beings and not machines.
• Content is King: Believe me this is one thing that will beat you badly. I am not saying that content should not be ignored but than content is not really the king. (I am assuming that I have written good content...Self prophecy my dear). The problem with present day web is that it is huge in volume. People have very less time to judge if content is good or not. I am sure there are many many good content in the net which probably no one apart from author is going to read. There are billions of blogs where there is only one visitor, the author himself.

• Backlinks: Search engines and searchability of site depends on backlinks. The more backlink a site has got, the more powerful it is in web. But how to get backlinks and that too from good authoritative sites. There are link farms which can be purchased but most of the search engine will see those backlinks negatively. Backlinks are the biggest pain in the neck of most of the individual site owners.

• Directory and Search Engine Submissions: You can submit the site into many online directories which I am not sure if any one refers to any more. That's a pre Google era. In fact, if we look into the world Internet traffic, there are really three players Google, Bing and Yahoo. Rest all are meaningless and interesting the three are free and many of the other unknown once will ask money to list you. Probably that's the only way for them to earn money. The one directory that is still considered authoritative is DMOZ and I have submitted my link there. It's a human reviewed directory. And I think my submission is not going to be reviewed in this life.

So what we average mortal do? That's a good question. Those who have started the site or blog for a simple reason to write, keep continue to write and enjoy

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