Follow and nofollow links refer to a tag that can be placed in the linking (anchor) code of your website.  It usually comes in the form of the “rel” attribute.  It looks something like this:

<a href=”http://www.jtgraphic.net” rel=”nofollow”>jtGraphicn.net</a>

Why are these attributes on links important?  They help organize the internet and give relevancy to websites that deserve it and don’t give relevancy to websites that don’t.  Google and other search engines use this information in the “rel” attribute to tabulate the score, or authority, that one website gives to another.

Getting a large number of follow links increases the relevancy of your website for the keywords relevant to the link.  Usually the “anchor text” or text between the <a>…</a> tags is what most directly contributes to keyword relevancy.  When websites build in areas where users can submit their own information, they tend to use nofollow links to reduce spam related link follows.  Simply neglecting to include a “rel” attribute makes a link a “follow” link.

You can get follow links many places, including top comments areas on blogs, guest posting, press coverage, and article submission sites.  There are a ton of other places to get follow links as well.  What do you find is the best way to get follow links?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: FAQ: What are follow and nofollow links?

Probably the single biggest question about building websites I get is how to drive traffic. I’m not saying it’s the most important part, but it’s definitely key. Content is king, sure, but if you don’t have traffic, you could be pouring your heart out to a wall. Really what every website wants is quality, converting, long-lasting traffic in high volumes.

There are essentially four ways to drive to your website, which are: search engines, direct traffic, referral links, and your ‘list’. I’m going to teach you how each of those things work on an intermediate level and what their value is compared to the others. I’ll be covering some of the more detailed finer points of these traffic sources in the future. This is basically a primer for what is to come.

Search Engines and SEO

Traffic Potential

The traffic from search engines is theoretically unlimited, but it’s easy to find out the potential of specific keywords using Google’s External Keyword Tool. For instance, I know that there are 74,000 searches for the exact match phrase “keyword tools”. The potential of that keyword match is about 74,000. If you search for all of the key words you’d like to rank for you can sum them up and know your potential. Remember things like overlap between keywords though.

Building Volume

Building volume from search engines is probably the easiest way to drive traffic to your website. You just need to rank (and not necessarily that high) for your search phrases. There are two fundamental ways to build volume on your website through Search Engine Optimization. Those are: off-site optimization and on-site optimization.

On-site SEO is what most people think of when they think of SEO. That being said, I think it is the least useful. I feel like (by far) Google’s algorithm favors off-site SEO over on-site SEO. That is, of course, my opinion. You can do things, such as making sure you have relevant title tags, meta descriptions, and h1 content. You can also make sure that the linking structure on your site contributes the most link juice to the main page of your site (if that’s what you’re going for).

Off-site SEO is, for the most part, link building. You want back links to your site to give you ‘authority’ for the key words you’re trying to rank for. Each backlink you get is like a ‘vote’ for your site in the search engine.

You can get backlinks from a ton of places, like forums, blog comments, guest posts, articles, etc. The best way to determine if another website is worth putting time into is to look at the place where your link is most likely to show up, view the HTML source for those links, and check for this in the anchor tag:

rel=”nofollow”

If that’s over your head, just hit me up on Twitter, Facebook, or email and I’ll help you out. I can even look at the site for you.

The other major thing to keep an eye out for on your backlinks is the anchor text. Make sure the anchor text you’re leaving behind contains the keywords you’re trying to rank for. This means that if you’re putting them in your signature on a forum, don’t link to ‘My Website’, link to ‘Keyword Tools’ or whatever is relevant to what you’re working on.

I will be covering more on backlink building later in the ‘Referral Traffic’ section.

Referral Traffic

Traffic Potential

Referral traffic has unlimited potential (well, limited to every site on the Internet). Theoretically you can have EVERY website link to you and people would visit you through those links. Referral traffic can be pretty great, especially when it’s coming from highly trusted or niche specific sources. Something to be wary of is quantity versus quality. For example, ten visitors from a blog that converts at 50% are much more valuable than 100 visitors from a news site that converts at 1%.

Building Volume

There are really two major types of referral traffic, and those are paid sources and unpaid sources. Paid sources include ad networks like Google Adwords, or sponsored links, like the top listings on YellowPages.com. Un-paid sources are like twitter and Facebook updates, blog comment links, forum signatures, etc.

Paid Sources

Setting up ads using networks like Google Adsense or Facebook is the most common form of paid traffic, but you can also buy paid links and banners directly on other websites. Paid sources, when set up correctly can be a great source of targeted, convertible traffic. Be careful of paid linking as many of the search engines, especially Google frown upon it.

You can also outsource the generation of your traffic to physical people, or start an affiliate program. You can start paying affiliates $1 for everyone they get to sign up for your list. You can also hold a contest, giving away an iPad to the biggest source of referrals to your site over a given period of time. Always be wary of people “gaming” a system though.

Un-paid Sources

Building unpaid backlinks for referrals can be pretty easy. Unlike with SEO backlink building, you don’t need to worry about if the links are giving you ‘votes’. You’re merely trying to drive traffic to your site via other sites. Great sites include Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Digg.

Un-paid sources, of course, also include everything I mentioned in the SEO section above. I find that the best ROI is usually with websites that generate both traffic and “follow” links, so always be aware of the “follow” / “nofollow” value of your links, even though that may not be specifically relevant to this type of traffic.

Direct Traffic

Traffic Potential

Direct traffic is probably the best kind of traffic you can generate. It’s also probably the hardest to track. Direct traffic is virtually unlimited and the quality of visits is really high. The reason the quality is so high is because someone is physically entering your address into their browser to visit your website, so not only is it more work than other methods, but it also requires a bit of recall. Ultimately that means they want to be on your website.

Building Volume

You can literally build volume for this an unlimited number of ways. There are really only 4 categories of how to do it though. They are: offline marketing, video/audio, word of mouth, and collateral from other online marketing. Each of those probably has another whole subset of ways to market, but we’ll probably save that for another day.

Offline Marketing

You can do print advertising, such as business cards, pens, or magazine ads. The ROI of those things can be debated endlessly. The reality is that in some niches they work, and in others they don’t. You can also make shirts and and sponsor events and things like that. All of those things will associate a brand and website with the people involved, and they will become (hopefully) direct traffic users on your site.

Video and Audio

Video and Audio include both online and offline media, so when I’m talking about making a commercial, I mean it can be used on YouTube, Hulu, or your local Fox station. Audio can be in the form of podcasts or radio advertising. You might also be able to do a special radio spot on your local radio station. ALWAYS mention your website in your video and audio recordings, no matter how small. You need to make it part of your introduction: “Hello, I’m James Thompson from jtGraphic.net.”

Word of Mouth

This can have an almost viral effect on the growth of your traffic. The trick is: you have to have something worth talking about. If you have something worth talking about, people will tell their friends, blog about it, or in some other way, spread the word. Be wary – this works with negative feedback as well.

I built my first successful business almost entirely on word of mouth advertising. Every other type of advertising I did for that business was supplemental – like business cards were just a tool for people to remember my web address and phone number.

Collateral Advertising

This is when you generate direct traffic from other advertising that fits into one of the other three categories, because the person viewing your advertising stepped outside of the channel they were supposed to follow. For instance, when you have a Google Ad, and someone notes the URL and types it into the browser, it will register as direct traffic, and not a “click”. This is good and bad.

It is good, because you don’t have to pay for it, but that’s about it. You can’t track it, which is horrible. Thankfully, the number of people that do that is so low that it will hardly register. Other instances of this collateral are situations where your advertising causes people to talk and in turn generates word of mouth. Think about those risque Evony ads. People talk about them all the time. They know how to drive traffic.

Your List

Traffic Potential

This is another one of those potentially unlimited traffic sources. Right now, the potential is the size of the list. A 75 person list will probably get something under 75 visits (I usually guess around 50%). A 7500 person list will probably get something under 7500 visits.

The ratio of conversions from a double opt-in list are amazing. People must work to be part of your list and thusly want to receive it. This means they trust you, and depending on the frequency of your mailings, will usually buy from you if it makes sense to them.

Single-opt and non-opt lists don’t convert very well at all, especially if the list was acquired through some sort gray-hat or black-hat scheme. Usually non-opt lists are considered spam and will burn you, and many times you can get flagged for spam from single-opts as well.

Building Volume

Building your list can be difficult, especially if you don’t get much traffic or are just starting out. The finer points of building a list we’ll cover later, but basically your goal is to collect as many double-opt-in email addresses as possible.

Frank Kern, whom I have mixed feelings about build something called ListControl a while back, which helps increase the growth of your list. It’s not a novel piece of software, but it’s already built and free. Basically the concept is that you give people something free. If they refer your list to “x” number of other people, then they will receive something else that’s free, but cooler. The process just repeats itself until there is a viral-like effect.

Conclusion

In conclusion, you should always be building your traffic via all of these methods, all the time. Always be tracking the analytics of your website and figure out which traffic sources convert the best in terms of ROI. Remember that ROI involves both time and money. You should dedicate the bulk of your time to the sources with the best ROI, but always be trying the others in case the landscape of your niche changes.

This was meant as a stepping stone guide to building traffic, and I’ll be following up with more in-depth posts about each of these topics later.  For now, please throw your questions at me.  Feel free to email me or comment below.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: How to Build and Drive Website Traffic

Spread the word. Build links.

Now that you’re interacting with the community, you need to get out to other sources of information and spread the word. What will happen is you will increase your relevancy in SEO and generate some buzz about your blog project while you’re at it.

There are some shortcuts too, but they really detract from the authenticity of your venture. If you’re purely business minded, you can’t argue with the results though. One of the big lessons we learn in this post is that money and paying for advertising are great ways to accelerate the growth of your blog.

Commitment

15 hours or more and/or article creation/submission fees.

Produce Fresh Types of Content

This is no different than last week or the week before. I’m only going to mention it this less and less, but I don’t want to undermine how important it is. This is why people come to visit you and it’s why they’ll come back. Don’t disappoint them.

Always be creative with your content and do new things. Try a series like this one, make lists, solicit guest posts, or do interviews. Remember to always be changing things up and keeping things new for your users. When you’re developing your plan for posts each month, before choosing your topics, try determining the types of posts you’ll do.

Writing and Submitting Articles

The best way to do attract attention is to write for other people and get websites to talk about you. Write articles for article directories and do guest posting. Spend all of your time writing articles, but not for your own blog. Submit those articles to article submission sites and other blogs for guest posts.

You’ll have the most success writing 500+ word articles and pounding the pavement. That should cover most of the article directories out there in terms of minimum requirements and is a decent enough sized post for most blogs to accept it as a guest post. Make sure each article is unique, but about similar or the same topics. Link back to your websites main page or specific posts in every article.

If you’re not a great writer (you should probably reconsider doing something like a blog, but that’s for a different day), you can pay copy writing services to write for you. If you’re looking to go the even cheaper route, you can pay a service to build links for you. I’ve had amazing results with seolinkwheelers.com. I don’t really feel like link building services and copy writers are authentic to a real product, but one really must argue for their effectiveness and they do have their place.

I’ll hopefully be doing a post on link building later this week, so keep an eye out for that.

Problems I Had Last Week

My biggest problem last week was staying on track. I had a lot of business and life things happen, and the week just flew by. Life can be tough sometimes and it will catch up with you, but you need to push through! Be committed and don’t fall behind and you’ll be successful.

Last week, did you have any problems? successes? failures? Let me know.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 4

I was looking for an automated way to get Google Pagerank for a few hours and came up with quite a few things, but not many of them were very elegant.  Essentially, Google doesn’t provide an API and it’s against their terms of service to hit them up in an automated way.  I found quite a few places that have come up with close algorithms and calculate PR for sites, but that’s just not accurate enough for me.  The other option is to hit their PR URL that the toolbar uses.  For example:

http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&hl=en&ch=61470319184&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank&q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fforums.digitalpoint.com%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D164713

That returns the PR of Digital Point Forums, where I found that information, but you can’t change the reference URL, because of a checksum.  That’s the &ch= variable in the URL.  I’m working on a project that needs to look up PR on the fly though, so that just won’t work.  I ended up finding a script that I could use, but the guy didn’t put his URL in the comments, and I since can’t find it – oops.  I think he deserves a pat on the back though.  If this belongs to you, or you know who’s it is, let me know.

I tweaked the script and installed it on my Toolerific.com website.  Now you can go there and check the PR of any site without a captcha, which is nice.  The tool is here.

Now, the best automated way to check pagerank is to hit that site with cURL and take out the value of the HTML tag with the id “value”.  The reason that is the best automated way to do it is because Google may change their checksum rules and that will break the source code that I used to generate it, but that site will always be laid out like that, so you don’t have to worry about changing anything.  If you want the code I used, you can view it here.

Update: This doesn’t seem to work ALL of the time.  I suspect it has something to do with the checksum, but can’t figure it out.  Seems to be about 27% of the time, which isn’t great odds, but it works MOST of the time.  I’ll keep you posted if I find out more.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Automated Way to Find Google Pagerank