Front-End Book

Create Good Content

The best way to increase traffic to your website, is to offer good content or service. If people like what you are offering, they will come back to you and they will link to you. There is no single technique better than this one for generating traffic to your website. How many links do you think wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter or Firefox has? What they have all in common are great content, in different forms.

Search Engine Optimization

If the Search Engines cant find you, you dont exist. If you cant compete with wikipedia, facebook, twitter or firefox for good content, you have to use all the white-hat SEO-techniques you can find in order to optimize your website for search engines. This can be done both on-site and off-site.

Link Exchange

Contact people who run websites or blogs similiar to yours and offer them a link to their site in exchange for a link back to you. This is a good way to start building links organically to your website. When your website is getting more and more popular, more people will contact you with similar offers. Only link to sites that actually has something to do with what you are offering. In order to maximise the search engine optimization, make sure the links you get corresponds to the keywords you are targeting.

Affiliate programs

If you are selling something online. Start an affiliate program and track referrals and give some of your profit to the one who referred the customer to you. If your offer is ok, people will start talking about your affiliate program and start generating traffic to your site, hoping to convert a user and earn a dollar or two. I think more and more people will start using this as a way to drive traffic to their sites. As it is today affiliate programs are mostly used by big players.

Pay Per Click Search Advertising

There are a couple of big solutions today for PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising. The biggest name in the industry is of course Google Adwords. Yahoo and Microsoft also offers solutions for PPC-advertising. With PPC you either target a number of keywords and buy advertising space next to search result, or you buy advertising space on other sites that fits your targeted keywords and website content.

Banner Advertising

A lot of big blogs offers advertising possibilities for banners. Today the most commonly used format for banners on blogs are the square ones you often see above the fold on the right on blogs such as Problogger.net and alikes. The CPM for these type of banners differ a lot but I am sure you can find a good deal for such banner advertising if you look around the blogosphere. You can also post on webmaster forums such as forums.digitalpoint.com where you will find a big and alive community.

Social Networks

Use your contacts to drive traffic to your website. Use both your offline contacts and your online contacts. Typical examples on driving traffic to your site could be the following:

- Mail all your contacts (if they are part of the intended audience) about your website
- Create a Facebook Group that focus on your new website
- Sign up for MyBlogLog.com and promote your website as a commmunity
- Promote your website on MySpace
- Create a short (fun) movie and post it to YouTube.com
- Change your signature on all forums you are active on to include your new website
- Print a t-shirt with your websites url on and wear it to work and when shopping

Competitions and give-aways

Create a simple competition where you hand out a prize or two. The typical prize could be an ipod and a lifetime VIP-membership on your website. If you really want to build traffic, create a competition that acts as a link bait, making the contestants create natural links in forums and such. This is one of the most effective way to get links and traffic. But you have to have somewhere to announce the competition. I would suggest using competitions when you have started to gain an audience.

Link Baits

Link baits are powerful, but sometimes difficult to come up with. It is important to understand the concept. Link baits are content that gets people to link in numbers. A typical example could be someone naming their child Google, a woman throwing up on live TV, a funny letter, a mugshot or just something stupid. You get the picture? Link baits are important but also a question of timing and luck. Typical content that can be considered link baits is:

- Top 10 lists
- Articles with authority that helps people on a matter where there are a lot of interest
- A funny picture, story or movie
- Unique Content such as screenshots from new software or screencaps from upcoming movies
- Something cool or astounding

Link Building

Link building incorporates a lot of different techniques and approaches. This is long-time job and something that builds traffic long-term. But done right it is going to make a huge difference for your traffic. Link building can contain these approaches:

- Article submissions
- Directory submissions
- Social Network submissions
- Commenting on blogs
- Add link to footer in forums you are active in

Buy Traffic

There are a lot of different solutions available out there for buying traffic, from targeted traffic from adwords to people redirecting to your site from domains no longer in use. As you can see the quality of the traffic may differ a lot and you have to take this into account when thinking of buying traffic. But watch out, dont let good offers fool you, a lot of scams exists out there, if someone is selling 10000 unique visitors for $10 it is probably too good to be true.

In order to maximise the profits from the increased traffic, it is important that you know your front end architecture. Front-end architecture covers a vast range of topics within web development, seo and other areas.