Simple ways to increase your traffic

Getting traffic to your blog or website is without doubt the most important task that you can do for your websites.  When I got an e-mail from Leads Leap on this subject I quickly clicked through to join the discussion. Kenneth Loh, the site owner was explaining to his readers that you can implement a very easy tactic to increase your traffic.  It comes as no surprise that this tactic is often ignored by many bloggers and it is a very easy strategy to include on your blog.

So what is this tactic?

Quite simply translation, by including a script to upload to your server or installing a plugin to your WordPress blog you can increase your traffic exponentially. Kenneth’s solution was to upload a script to your server; this in turn would allow the search engines to index your pages in any of the 34 languages offered by the script.  I pointed out that there was an easier solution, rather than having to upload a script to your server why not simply install the N2H WordPress plugin.

One or two of Kenneth’s readers pointed out that there were free services are available such as Google’s free translation service. Kenneth replied that these free services did not index the pages on the search engines: fair point. The thing is, if it’s a choice between uploading a script and installing a plugin then I would go for the plugin 9 times out of 10 just for shear convenience if nothing else.

As for indexing your translated pages for the search engines this plugin does the job by configuring your permalink to include the chosen language in this format, http://web-workathome.com/fi/ this is for the Finnish language, as for individual posts or deeper pages Google Translate comes into use. At this point the URL looks like a complete mess, and to tell the truth I have no idea if this would come up on any of the specified language search engines, here’s what the URL looks like after Google has translated the post or deeper page….

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&langpair=en|fi&u=http://web-workathome.com/igoogle-works-home/&prev=/language_tools

I doubt very much that this would be included in any search engine results page, but the main point out of this exercise is to translate your home page in this format http://web-workathome.com/fi/ which is more search engine friendly and will lead to your visitor to click through to other pages on your site.

All of these tools are very convenient and easy to set up, but I would venture to say that getting your whole site translated professionally would pay huge dividends for your traffic intake. There are many services available to translate your website and a little bit of research and marketing would go a long way to increasing your exposure, for instance if you were to tap into the Spanish speaking world you could be looking at a further 23 countries, certainly worth considering.

Let me know what you think

Bill Masson @ Web-Work At Home

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