Online Communities | Articles

Do you consider your target audience when exchanging links?

Link exchanges still prove to be a popular way to gain direct traffic, create relationships with other webmasters, improve search engine rankings and create awareness of your site. There is one important factor you should always ensure you consider before exchanging links with another site though: is the site suitable and relevant to your audience?
Untargeted [...]

Are you frustrating your visitors?

A visitor arrives at your website – great, huh? Well, yes – but if you are frustrating your visitors, they might as well never have arrived in the first place.
Web users are lazy
I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: Web users are lazy. If you don’t believe me, think of your own [...]

How traffic stats help you make decisions

I come across many people posting on forums asking questions such as:
- Should I used fixed width or a fluid layout for my website?
- Should I design for a 1024×768 or a 1280×1024 screen resolution?
- Should I go for some great looking Flash, or keep things lean and fast loading?
There really should be no need [...]

Attract forum traffic through article writing

You run a forum site, your site has a forum - but does it have anything else? Bulking up your website by adding new sections and publishing articles can create a more engaging user experience, help you attract new traffic and ultimately help your forum become successful.
The more you add, the more you attract

One of [...]

Understand your site’s bounce rate

The ever increasing use of Google Analytics is resulting in a new obsession amongst website developers: that of the bounce rate.
In this article I will explain what is meant by the term ‘bounce rate’ and why it is important to understand.
What is meant by bounce rate?
Put simply, the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors [...]

Think before soliciting a link exchange

If you are link building, you need to set yourself apart from all the other link exchange requests that popular sites receive. It is also extremely important that you undertake some basic research on every potential link exchange partner.
What you need to research
It is essential that you take the time to understand the site you [...]

Link building IV - Creating awareness

This is the concluding article in a series that started on 22 May 2007, with ‘Link building I - Gaining direct traffic‘, and was followed with ‘Link building II - Creating relationships‘ on 24 May 2007 and ‘Link building III - Improving search rankings‘ on 28 May 2007.
In this article I will write about how [...]

Link building III - Improving search rankings

This article is a continuation of the article series that started on 22 May 2007, with ‘Link building I - Gaining direct traffic‘, and was followed with ‘Link building II - Creating relationships‘ on 24 May 2007.
In this article I will write about how to improve your search engine rankings through the link building process.
Identify [...]

Link building II - Creating relationships

This article is a continuation of the article series that started on 22 May 2007, with ‘Link building I - Gaining direct traffic‘.
In this article I will write about how the link building process can help create and nurture relationships with other web developers and the benefits these relationship can bring.
Link building is not used [...]

Link building I - Gaining direct traffic

Starting a community site is a real challenge - without people you have no community, but people don’t want to join a community when there are no other members!
Getting an online community started from scratch is a huge challenge, but I believe there is no more rewarding site than a successful online community.
In this link [...]

Watching referral stats can aid growth

You should always be checking your website’s traffic logs. Just Chat is seven years old and I still check my traffic stats at least every week through Google Analytics. In this article I want to talk about the importance of your referral stats in particular, and how using them correctly can actually further increase traffic [...]

Compare your site traffic

If you want to compare the levels of traffic your site is getting against other sites such as competitors, you may use Alexa. Alexa measures traffic information by their overall popularity against all other websites. As you may expect, the big sites such as Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft appear right at the top. Just Chat [...]

Get free traffic for your blog

Getting Free Traffic & Exposure For Your Blog
It is no good having a blog if nobody is reading it! It would be like talking to yourself, but without the odd looks from passers-by.
Here are some steps I took in order to attract traffic to this blog without spending a penny on advertising:
Add Content
There is [...]

LinkAlizer case study

I recently read about LinkAlizer at BlogCityTales and it seemed like a good way of finding new websites to exchange links with. Therefore, I thought I would sign up and see how things went.
If you have a high number of relevant, quality websites linking to yours it will boost your search engine popularity. As Community [...]

Avoiding traffic greed

I touched upon the issue of ‘traffic greed’ in an earlier post and thought I would elaborate a little further on this term today.
What is traffic greed?
Traffic greed occurs when you are eager to attract traffic to your website at any cost. You want visitors and you want them now. You want people on your [...]

StumbleUpon case study results

Well it has now been a week since I setup an advertising account for Just Chat over at StumbleUpon. My initial intention was to allow the traffic to flow for a week, and then see how effective the traffic was by comparing it to a benchmark figure for the number of ‘Bounces’ the Just Chat [...]

The most important link exchange factor

What factors do you take into account when considering what sites to set up a link exchange with? I take into account the standard factors such as:

What is the site’s current PageRank?
Is the site relevant to my audience?
Do I actually like the site?
What kind of traffic is their site getting?

Of course, all of these are [...]

StumbleUpon case study

Well as promised, I have now setup a trial with StumbleUpon to see the effects of their advertising program on traffic at Just Chat. As detailed in a previous post on the subject, I am not interested in people visiting the site and simply leaving once they get to the index page - there is [...]

StumbleUpon take two

I finally managed to get an activation email from StumbleUpon by using my Yahoo! email address. I have no idea why the one sent to my business email address was not being received - I checked all the spam filters but am still clueless.
Anyway, I have decided to give StumbleUpon’s advertising program a try for [...]

Are load times costing you traffic?

It is so very easy in this broadband age we are currently enjoying to forget that not everyone has a fast connection. I have been playing around building websites since around 1999. At this time, a 56kbps connection was about the best a home user could expect - consequently those responsible for designing websites paid [...]

Stumbled over

I came across the website StumbleUpon a few weeks ago and thought I would give their advertising program a try. Basically, StumbleUpon is a browser add-on which allows you to easily find new websites which may be of interest to you.

Screenshot of the browser plug-in
You simply click on a category that interests you, [...]