It’s a common thing said amongst webmasters, what’s your pagerank?  How do you get your pagerank up?  Indeed, pagerank is an important part of your website.  It helps to determine where your page will rank in search engine results.  It’s a measure of the quality and quantity of links to your site.  But is that the one thing you should be focusing on in your website?

Pagerank is just one of many aspects to your sites health.  It is important, but not the most important thing to work on.  You can have a pagerank 1 or 0 site that gets more traffic and generates more money for you than a higher pagerank site.  You have to look at the niche you’re website is in, and the keywords for your site.  If the keywords are highly searched you’ll likely have a lot of competition and a hard time getting your pagerank up.  But that site will probably get more traffic than one that doesn’t have much competition because the keywords aren’t searched often.

Generating traffic is a combination of things, working on the keywords, the pagerank (building backlinks), and generating unique quality content are what you need to focus on to garner the traffic that you want.

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One thing that a lot of webmasters encounter is frustration.  It’s easy to lose focus on your website when you get no traffic.  The Internet is an extremely competitive place and unless you have a lot of money for advertising or a very clever idea for a website chances are you’ll be last in line for traffic on the web.  One way to stave off this frustration is to set up realistic goals for your website.

It’s important to set small easy to obtain goals so that you don’t lose focus.  If you choose a goal of getting one thousand visitors a day it could be many months or years before that happens, during that time you won’t feel like you’re making any kind of progress.  The goals should be small and easily obtained at first.

It’s also important to set different kinds of goals.  Maybe your first goal is to average 50 unique visitors per day.  Then the next goal could be impressions per day (impressions are different than visitors, one visitor can generate many page impressions).  If you’re running ads on your site that pay per click you could set a goal of one click per day after that.  Then go back to unique visitors.  Then maybe instead of clicks per day it’s amount of money per day earned from the ads.

Keep going with the goals and make sure you vary them.  By varying your goals you’ll learn different things about your visitors.  You’ll also learn valuable lessons about traffic and how to convert it to money, returning visitors, and how you site will grow in the future.

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Traffic traffic traffic!  You need traffic.  If you want your site to be profitable you need traffic.  But did you know that all traffic is not created equal.  There are returning visitor, there are visitors finding your site through a link, and there are visitors finding your site through search engines.

All three are important.  You want returning visitors since they’re more likely to post a comment on your site thus adding to the content.  These visitors however, are going to be the least profitable for you.  Returning visitors become blind to ads very quickly and will not click on them.  In fact I suggest you disable ads for users that are logged in.  You know they’re a frequent visitor if they’re logged in, and they’re ad blindness will cause your click through percentages to go down.

Users that click onto your site through a link are the most likely to convert to regular users.  Presumably they found your site because they found a link to it on another site with a similar topic to yours.  Since they’re already interested in what your site has to offer they’ll be less likely to click on ads, but more likely than if they had visited before.

People that find your site through search engines are the most likely to click on ads.  They typed in a search and often the search wasn’t specific enough or it was too specific.  Your site came up and it is pretty close but not quite what they’re looking for.  People scan web pages in a matter of a few seconds and if they don’t think they’ll find what they want on your site they’ll leave.  Either through the back button or a link on your
site.

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We discussed earlier that you need backlinks to your website to drive traffic to it.  This practice is called backlinking.  When looking for a site to put a link back to your website you need to do a little research first.  Blogs and forums are a common place to provide backlinks to your site.  However, many blog owners add an additional property to the link called ‘nofollow’.  What this means is that the link will work and anyone can click on it, but in will mean nothing for your rank in search engine results.  The nofollow property tells search engines that they should not follow this link.

Different search engines treat the link differently, but Google and Yahoo both do not count the link towards a link to your website when calculating search results (the more links to your site the higher it will appear in search results).  This practice has been adopted to discourage people from spamming sites with links to their own site.

If the blog or forum relates to your sites topic then you’ll at least get traffic from people that are interested in what your site is about.  But you’ll only be getting half of the benefit.  There are many forums and blogs out there (this one included) that do not put the ‘nofollow’ property on their links provided by users.  If you can find one of these then you should go there a few times a week and post something relevant to the topic
at hand.  Doing this will help you slowly build up some backlinks.

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People in the webmastering business will tell you that content is king.  Well if content is king then traffic is queen.  You can have all the great unique content in the world but if you only get a dozen visitors a day then your site isn’t worth much.  There are a number of ways to get traffic to your site.  First you need to make sure that your site is in all the search engines index, you can do this by submitting your site to the search engine or by linking it to an already existing site (when the search engines index that page they’ll follow the link).

Now that your site is known to the search engines you need to start building up links to it from other sites.  Doing so will help to increase your traffic to the site as well as increase your pagerank for search results pages.  There are a number of ways to build up links.  You can link to it through blogs.  Linking to your site through a blog post is easy and if you can find a blog that pertains to your sites topic then not only do you build a link for the search engines but people visiting the blog will click the link and probably visit a few pages on your blog.

Another common way to build up relevant links is through forum posts.  Find some forums that relate to your site and put a link to it in some of your posts, make sure your posts are on topic though.  If the forum allows it you can also link to the site in your signature, that link is less likely to be followed by visitors but search engines like it all the same.

Directories seem to be a common thing sprouting up all over.  Directories are like phone books.  You can submit your site to the directory in the relevant categories and if they approve your site you’ll be listed.  Most of the top ranked directories have stringent requirements for being listed and some require that you pay a yearly fee.  Others will ask you to provide a link back to their directory in exchange for their link to your site.

Link exchanges are like directories in that they link to you, but they require that you link back to them (hence the name).  If you can get on a link exchange with a high pagerank site you’ll see your pagerank go up that much more.  It’s important to note that the major search engines seem to frown on link exchanges, they will randomly go through sites listed on link exchanges and knock the rankings of each site listed down a few notches.  So proceed at your own risk with those.

Ads are another way to drive traffic.  A clever ad on the right site can bring in a lot of good traffic to your site.  This method is pretty difficult since most of us are not ad marketing guru’s as well as webmasters.  This method can also be very costly as you try to find the right ad to drive traffic.

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