Since last couple of weeks, you might be seeing a major change in your website’s Alexa traffic ranking. Alexa seems to be now became more reliable than before as they are not considering the inputs from only the people who are using the Alexa toolbar anymore as per the announcement.

We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

Alexa has become a yardstick for majoring the website quality since last few years and they tried to improve with the feedback they receiving from Alexa community.

What is changed for us?

We have seen a push in the Alexa rank and reached to 105,836 now fro 115,000. This is not a huge jump as such, but considerable increase. Due to recent surge in traffic of this blog on ipl t20 search, 1-week average on this blog has reached to 78,301 so we are hoping to cross a milestone of getting into top 100,000 websites in the world soon.

Want to see increase in your traffic?

There are many ways to increase your traffic but one of the ways I could find out from my experience is to gain the free search engine traffic by capitalizing on the seasonal searches. There are many more ways like Free traffic from Entrecard that would certainly help you to increase your Alexa traffic rank.

Did you see change in your Alexa traffic ranking too? Let me know.

First you would need to know about Entrecard credits to understand the concept of building these free links from good quality blogs. In simple words, Entrecard is the blog community to get free traffic by placing your ad on other blogs. We can earn Entrecard credits by dropping our card to other blogs and getting the similar cards on our blog as well. Earlier even reaching to 500 credits was a big task as there were not many blogs in the community but now there are 1000s of blogs, so earning 1000-2000 credits in a month is not a big deal.

Now here is the interesting thing, how to use these entrecard Credits? I would be spending those ECs on recently added blogs with good and other than EC traffic where we barely need 2-20 credits to spend but not on highly priced blogs but with low traffic rankings. Remaining EC credits, I would prefer to keep in my account. Interestingly many bloggers still don’t have many credits in their account and want them to advertise on those highly priced blogs, alright that’s fine! These blogs look for some free Entrecard credits being in ‘casual and relax’ category of EC droppers.

Now here are simple steps for you to get free backlinks offering your Entrecard credits to the participant bloggers.

• Host a Entrecard credit giveaway contest asking for just a backlink from their post and declare the price of Entrecard credits [around 500 EC credits to 1000 EC credits should be good].
• Another way of hosting the contest is to give away the EC credits to everyone who would write about your blog or give you a simple backlink.
• Drop messages to the friends and blogs at Entrecard from categories like blogging resources or Internet marketing - where the blogs are about web traffic, blogging, marketing, making money online etc.
• Submit your blog contest link to contest bloggers, contact them directly or comment on their post.
• You shall see participation from your fellow bloggers depending on your marketing tactics and spreading the word about the contest.

Certainly, you would see increase in your backlinks & apparently increase in your technorati rankings as well. What did you spend to gain these quality backlinks, nothing else but your free entrecard credits, isn’t it? You would know the value of each backlink, when you would be asked to pay anything between $5 to $40 for backlinks from quality blogs. Then why not to get it for free by spending some of your free Entrecard credits.

Well, is the title little confusing for you? What’s seasonal search engine traffic by the way, and how to get it if it’s free? It’s no technical term or SEO term as such, but it’s my brainchild.

What is seasonal traffic?

This is the traffic that may not be generated all year long but at particular time of the year. So it’s surge in traffic for some time, and I am 110% sure no webmaster or blogger would mind an extra surge in traffic other than the regular one.

How to target seasonal search engine traffic?

I experimented with this idea recently and started getting the traffic within a week for those targeted keywords. This is what you would need to do, simple steps to follow

• Keep in mind the upcoming festival or event. Preferably watch for something coming up next month. If your blog is visited by Google bot or any search engine bot often, then even 2-3 weeks time period is fine too.
• Research the keywords that would be searched often during this time period, and make a quick list. You might take help of few keyword suggestion tools wiz. Overture’s keywords suggestion tool.
• Build a post around these keywords. Keep in mind that this post should be inline with your blog theme and categorized well. I mean, do not write something about Christmas on a finance blog at least. If you see, I have a category called “life” that is a generic category and I post my ramblings about anything in there.
• Try to incorporate the keywords in the title of the post itself, that will give the results little quicker. Read more about optimizing title of the blog post for search engines.
• Use alternate keywords in the same post if possible. But this is not mandatory as such. [After observing Google's behavior - I found out that the search engines pick up combination of keywords from all over the blog. Sometimes, one keyword from one post, and another from second post. So more varied topics on the blog, more traffic you receive. But this might not be targeted traffic all time]
• Post this in your blog and you are done. Just keep your fingers crossed and keep watching your visitor analysis.

Did it work for me, yes it did! I kept in mind that Valentines is coming up on 14th February and most of guys and girls search online for valentine gift ideas to gift their loved ones, isn’t it. I posted about valentine gift ideas only 6 days back, and I started getting traffic for this keyword within a week. Check this Google search engine result for valentine gift ideas and you shall find my website at No 1 spot right now in Google India.

This might differ as per local search engines, and I am seeing the website at different places. The sitemeter visitor analysis showing me this particular search keyword often though and I am expecting more traffic till 14th Feb. See even if it’s good SEO technique to target seasonal keywords, due to the dynamic nature of internet, your search engine ranking may go up or down eventually. It will be completely depend on your blog’s or website’s ranking in search engines. You must read how to work on your search engine rankings by building quality backlinks.

Traffic! One important word that makes webmaster’s nights sleepless. Being a webmaster, now I understand how all time I keep finding out newer ways to get traffic to my blogs. Mostly I focus on finding ways to get free traffic and it’s obvious because we are hard working people and why would we like to spend money when there is a option or workaround available to save money. To simply justify how we can get free traffic, let me give you quick example. Rather than advertising on a forum, why I would not prefer to be a regular poster with 3-4 links in my signature to gain back links as well as some traffic back. My opinion here is, yes there are numerous ways to get free traffic from many sources and I have a plan to write series of posts on gaining free traffic from my own experience of last 4 years, if you don’t want to miss the bus - this is the right time to subscribe to this blog feed.

Due to the revenue making potential of blogs and websites and ways people finding out to make money online through their online ventures, webmasters are making enough money and willing to spend part of it on investing it back to their websites. This post targets to those webmasters who have some paypal money lying and can be spent on advertising.

Sometimes you would never imagine, but you can find out dirt cheap advertising for some of those high traffic websites or blogs. But I cannot guarantee that it will last for long, as many of you would jump in to advertise on such websites and hike the advertising prices by bidding one after another. I know I would have just kept it for myself, but then I don’t want to do that and share it with you here.

I found a website, projectwonderful.com where we can bid to advertise on ad spots on available websites. This bidding would be on per day basis. If the min bid says $0.10 that means if no one outbids you, your ad will remain at that ad spot for $0.10 for all day and will continue like that till someone outbids you. Can you see a little 125×125 ad spot in the snapshot, that’s the ad spot available to bid at projectwonderful.com. My website is currently displaying the Ad spot above the fold and the min bid is set to $0.10, you are any time welcome to bid on this ad spot and show your banner here.

I know that my blog traffic is not very high, but it’s decent enough to get me an Alexa rank of 163K [at this moment]. When I searched more, I found out that there is an advanced search option available at this website where I can search by daily traffic and current bid. As I mentioned in the title of this post, there are some real cheap advertising options available in here. Check out this snapshot.

Go down on the image, and you would observe that I searched for websites that have minimum 5000 page views every day and current bid between $0.01 to $0.20 and that is what I found out. Now here we would need to work a little, visit the available sites and find out sites that has this ad spot available above the fold and from the same or similar niche your blog is in. So there is lot to play with this search option and find out best ad spots available. I know what you doing next!

As a webmaster you know, how important is to optimize your website for search engines. If you have been spending time reading SEO articles, there are numerous advices on how to increase the traffic using search engine optimization techniques. I am talking about white hat search engine optimization of course. Obviously implementing SEO techniques is important, but I would like to mention how important data analysis is in here. There are tools like Google analytics who help you to analyze your visitor’s behavior.

Same way, I have found a Search engine positioning service that helps to track positioning of your specific keywords in search engine over the period of time. This SEO tool records your websites positioning in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN for keywords you choose everyday. You need not to even remember to keep a watch on it, as you would receive email everyday with positions of your website or even whenever the position changes in the search engine. This will keep you alert. This is very important for the online businesses where most of the sale depends on search engine traffic. I would have been happy to receive a free trial period but still I believe this service is very useful for every webmaster targeting specific audience through search keywords for their websites and online businesses.

This website has been built with good features for webmasters, though they shall make sure that users are not turned down with small spelling mistakes in the homepage text like “search engine optimalization tool”. I have written a post about Spell Check before you post for bloggers, and that post might help webmasters to improve on quality of website text. I would also suggest them to start offering trial period to webmasters and I would certainly see many conversions to paid service of $19.99 per month once they see the usefulness and get addicted to the email reports everyday.