by Sutocu
Web 2.0 offers us blogs, social bookmarking, wikis and feeds. But how to turn all these tools to your website’s favor, and increase your traffic?

Blog and Ping

Whenever you add a feature to your website, or update the content, post about it in a blog, and remember to include a link to the relevant page. You could have a blog on your site for that purpose, or you can register for a free blog in the service of your choice.

Follow each blog post with a ping to search engines and blog catalogs. Many blogs can do this automatically, but you can do it manually, too. Search engines will then find you new post, and follow the links to your new or updated page. When launching a new site, you could post once a day for the first week to make sure your site gets noticed. Link to different pages to ensure search engines don’t stop at your front page.

Socialize It!

Social bookmarking sites like Stumble Upon, Digg and del.icio.us give you many tools to promote your website. The most obvious is posting a blurb about new features and content, and linking to your site. This can be made more effective, if you post about something interesting, like a competition you launch on your site, and then get some friends to vote for your post. Getting your post on the front page may mean hundreds of visitors in just minutes.

Another way to benefit is to add ‘Favorite this website’ and ‘Stumble upon’ links to your website. Then happy visitors can refer you more targeted traffic. Avoid cluttering your site with many links to different bookmarking services, though. Choose those that fit your site image best: a software site should link to Technorati and Slashdot, while a current news site should use Newswine.

Tagging

The idea of tags is categorization of information. They are very much like keywords, and that’s how you should see them. In fact, tag lists are the new ‘keywords’ meta-tag. When tagging your blog posts, keep in mind the keywords you are targeting with search engines.

Tagging draws together both of the earlier topics. They are widely used on social bookmarking sites, but are also indexed by search engines as your page content. If you can incorporate tags well into your website, you can help both you visibility on bookmarking sites, and your search engine rankings.

Sutocu is the author of the webmaster resources Your Website Profit and Ad Network Reviews

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