Traffic is the life blood for any internet business. To be successful in your business, it is essential to have targeted, good quality visitors to your website. Without a steady flow of traffic, you can not earn any income from your website. There are different ways to generate traffic, some of which are paid whereas the others are free. The following are some ways to generate free traffic to your website:

1. The content of your website should be unique and keyword rich. A good keyword rich content will drive targeted traffic from the search engines.

2. Start a blog and make regular posts on it. Visit other similar blogs and leave comments on them. Add a RSS feed to your blog.

3. Write a lot of articles on different topics which are relevant to the subject of your website. The articles should be short (300 to 500 words) and should contain different important keywords. Go for ‘Long Tail Keywords’ which are less competitive. Add the URL of your website at the end of each article. Submit your articles to different reputed article directories like Ezinearticles, GoArticles, Articlebase etc. When these articles are published in these high PR article directories, they may come up in the search engine results for the relevant keywords. People may read these articles and visit your site through the links given at the end . This is an excellent way to drive targeted traffic to your website. However, if you can not write the articles yourself, you may get those outsourced from other freelance writers.

4. Go to ‘Yahoo Answers’ and answer questions which are relevant to your niche. After each answer, put a link back to your site.

5. Submit your site to different online directories. Some of these directories are free whereas the others are paid. The paid directories are better than the free directories as the links stay there for a much longer time. Submit your site to both general as well as niche directories. This will help you to get traffic as well as important backlinks for your site. 

6. Try to exchange links with other websites which are in the same niche and have similar content. It will help to increase traffic to your site by securing a high rank in the search engines.

7. Join different online communities and forums which are relevant to your niche. Participate in the forums on a regular basis and share your knowledge with other members. Advertise your site by putting your link in the signature line.

8. Write a press release about your site and submit that to different press release submission sites.

9. Sign up with different social networking sites such as, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. with a link back to your site.

10. You can advertise your website in different high traffic classified sites such as, Craigslist, USFreeAds etc. 

11. Traffic exchanges may be used to drive free traffic to your site. But the traffic received is not always targeted.

Any new way to get free traffic to add? Share it with us…

Many webmasters including me are looking for a demo video on how to use Google Website Optimizer.

Fortunately, the Google Team has created a great one here :

Now-a-days Link building has became a part in website development life cycle. People are using search engines to search information on this huge World Wide Web (www) which consists of billions of web pages.

Google which is the Big brother of all the search engines is assigning page rank to a webpage depending on some constraints like Keyword density, Number of pages that link to your site etc,.

The page rank is crucial in making your page lead first in the search results. So, getting page rank is not that much easy , but not very difficult if you spend some valuable time . You should have a perfect blend of keyword density and Incoming links to a webpage.

Building too many low quality links will not fetch your page a good page rank. There is a pattern that place your webpage in the first page of search results.

Here are the tips that make you good at link building:

Blog commenting: This will fetch you more links than any other link building strategy and it is almost you can do it freely and there is no need to spend a single penny if you spare your valuable time. First you have to make a list of dofollow blogs. You can do this by checking blogs and websites by using a plugin in firefox , or else there is a great way you can accomplish this – You will find a list of dofollow blogs in Forums like Digital point etc, .

Select some blogs which are having good page rank and make a list. You should comment on the page on a particular blog which is having good page rank . You should check every page for their page rank because all the pages in a blog are not well ranked and some are not ranked. So, you should select a page which is having good rank. You can check the page rank of a particular page by copying the URL of the page and check using Page rank checker tool.

Make a comment on the post or article such that the comment should not look like spam and should be interesting and make the comment reasonably long.

Now place a link in the comment such that it should mingle in the comment and don’t put simply link but with anchor text and this is important. And one more thing mostly select the content of the page on which you are commenting should be relevant to content to the page which you link.

You can also comment on non-relevant content page but make this little but these links are also significant.

Forum Posting: This is also a famous way to build links to your website or blog page. But don’t keep more hopes that this will play a part in getting your page ranked but helps in quick indexing by google crawlers.

But if you make the post with more quality and make a link to your site page mingled in the post and should be relevant to the content definitely this can also play an important role. Here is how this will work, when the people found the post interesting and finds the link in between the post, they can click on the link and be redirected to your webpage. Then if the page you are linking is great post definitely the visitor can link back to your page in their blog post. So, you can get the quality links and that too one way link (One way linking makes you page a high quality page to Google).

Article Directories: Article Directories are the good sources to link building, But you should choose high ranked article directories because every page created will get good page rank in few days. So, better start with page rank 5 directories. I will not mention the list of directories here but you can Find them from Google.

One thing you should keep in mind is these article directories want high quality content and only give you a chance to place only one link with an anchor text, But it is worth and will play a major part to get your page to high rank.

Bookmarking sites: Choose highly ranked Bookmarking sites like Digg, Technorati, Stumble upon, Reddit etc, . These are some dofollow Bookmarking sites. Bookmarking is now days a free tool which will make our blog or website more popular and get your page indexed quickly.

Blog Directories: These are another important form to build links to your website. Have a list of Blog Directories which are highly ranked and manually submit your website or blog to these directories.

But many sources have told that Google is not giving higher priority to Blog Directories in the current situation. But any way it helps your blog to become popular.

Rss Directories: Here is an another important resource where you can not only make your home page popular but also your posts or articles in the blog. Here how it works, First sign up for Rss directories and submit your rss feed URL. Every time you update your blog, the feed is updated in the Rss directory and the posts are listed in them.

WordPress has just released version 2.6.5. This contains urgent and important security fixes and you need to upgrade as soon as possible.

The security issue is an XSS exploit discovered by Jeremias Reith that fortunately only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x. If you are interested only in the security fix, copy wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php from the 2.6.5 release package.

Official Announcement.

If you would like to upgrade in a quick and easy way, take a look at My WordPress 2.6 Experience.