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Increasing Your Site Traffic By Enhancing Your Coding
By Roxanne Rives
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-02-08
Just because you have a site does not mean you are getting traffic. Your site could be as useful as the dust covered running shoes in your closet, you have them but they are not getting out there. Improving your web traffic can be done by SEO, but it can also be done by your code.
Here are a few pointers I learned this week. This is very useful to anyone who has a site or is thinking about having a site created.
Shorter Code - Shorter code means faster download times.
Better ranking - You'll already get a slight increase in rankings from a validated site, without even taking content into consideration.
Site Title Tags
Website title tags are the tags you see in the browser tabs, or top of your browser window. These are weighed heavily by Google, so make sure you have the most important keywords with special titles on each page.
Validation Validating your website is important in several ways.
Look at the SEO side. When you follow W3C standards to validate your site and you use proper tools like decreasing your IDS, using selectors, and naming elements accordingly, there are several traffic benefits you can get
Fix Broken Links
Having someone's browser attempt to load files that do not exist slows speeds on download times.
Link Title & Alt Tags
Link title and Alt tags are used to boost your SEO through keywords. You should have a title tag on every link describing what the link is, but also adding a few keywords into it. The same goes for alt tags on images. You're required to have them for validation. Put keywords on them as well.
Optimize Your PHP
There are several ways to optimize PHP to speed up download time.Variables - Declare variables outside of the loop, so its declared once and not repeated. Functions - Pass variables by reference to functions, instead of passing copies. File pointers - Always close these
Header Tags
As important as website title tags, header tags are also a great place to add keywords. Headers should be used sequentially. Therefor, your
<h1></h1>
tag should probably be the website name or section name,
should be the page name, and
should be a subheading or subsection name.
Submit Your Site
Submit your site to Google and Yahoo to raise website traffic. Submit your site to a public directory like dmoz.org to generate website traffic. This can take a month or so. There are tools out there that can help you submit your site to other directories, but be cautious, if the tool you choose is an agressive submittor, this will have a negative effect for your website. Your website traffic may go down and you can be penalized.
Optimize JS & CSS Files
Optimizing your files can greatly reduce your download times and server load. There are lots of free optimizers on the web. Your JS should also be broken up to multiple files, so each page isn't loading a bunch of script it isn't using.
Last but most important...
USE SOCIAL NETWORKING!!!!
I cannot explain how important this is other than Peanut Butter without Jelly just doesn't work!
Most Professionals Use Social Networking
Many online owners have heard of social networking, but are hesitant to use it as an advertising tool because they are under the impression that these networks only have young users. The truth is that this assumption is completely false as many of these sites specifically target career professionals.
In a recent survey conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity, it was reported that approximately 65% of business professionals use personal and professional social networking sites. Additionally, the same online survey revealed that most professionals gravitate to social sites like LinkedIn, followed closely by MySpace and Facebook.
Comments
About the Author:
Trying out about 3 new sites per week, Roxanne has chosen Social Media as her flavor. She spends several hours a day online, with a heavy focus on Facebook and Twitter. Learning, reading and sharing with other Social Medialites, Roxanne enjoys StumbleUpon in the place of her cup of coffee every morning. Combining Reddit, Digg, Blogger and Technorati, she recommends anyone to try out several pieces of Social Media and then narrow down to a few favorites that work for you based on your needs. Check out her blog at Social Media Rox.
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