by Jerry Bader
1. Think Audiences Not Markets

What’s your market? Hire a consultant to help you with your Web-business problems and one of the first questions he or she will ask is, what’s your market? How about eighteen to thirty-four year old, single male college graduates with a dog named Spot; or maybe forty-five to fifty-nine year old married women, who hate their husbands and can’t get their adult children to move out of the house. Maybe, just maybe, they’re asking the wrong question.

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This list is simply my top 5 ways to direct new traffic to a website, this list is not proven or based on any research, it is simply what I have found to work best for me in the past.

1. SEO
Some may be suprised by SEO being #1. It doesn’t directly improve your traffic, that’s true, but without it you will never improve your traffic. If you want to be ranked highly in search engines you will have to optimize your site, when was the last time a full flash site ranked #1 under any of the searches you performed?

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Many first time bloggers automatically assume that once their blog is setup and they put a few posts on it, they will get some hits and regular readers. This is quite untrue. You won’t get any traffic if no one knows about your website. In this article I hope to tackle these problems and discuss some of the common ways bloggers and webmasters drive more traffic to their site by understanding the user. I have received many emails from aspiring bloggers asking me what they can do to get more traffic, so hopefully this will help out at least those people. Don’t forget to checkout the prequel, How To: Start Blogging, that covers the technical side of setting up a blog.

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By Stas Bekman.

Published: June 25th 2006

Some time ago Google has added yet another great tool to its toolkit. And of course it’s still in Beta. It’s called Google Sitemaps.

It’ll probably do much more in the future but at the moment the most important feature is the ability to tell the google crawlers what pages to crawl, how important their are and when Google should revisit your site as you add new changes. The other very useful set of features is the insider view on how google sees your site, whether it sees some problems with it — e.g., whether it has problems crawling your pages, statistics — e.g., what keywords people used to find your site and the page rank of each of those pages.

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