Increasing Your Site Traffic How not to Do It!

I was offered a membership and “credits” to a site that offered automated traffic driven to my web site. My first thought was “why”? This was my first experience with such a site but after a little research, I discovered that there are many of them out there offering subtle variations on the same theme.

The premise of the service is that a website owner signs up for an account and then through the use of their program, your browser will load a new website at regular intervals (this one was every 10 seconds) thus creating “hits” on those sites. The more sites you load in your browser, the more credits you earn. Your credits earn your site a spot in the never ending loop which supposedly results in your site receiving visitors from other account holders. In no time at all you’ve increased the hits on your site by an enormous amount.

There are all kinds of things wrong with this, the most obvious of which is,why would you want traffic on your site from someone who isn’t likely even looking at it? Realistically, if you were to sign up for this service, would you really sit and look at all these sites? No. You’d set up your browser before you went to bed and let the thing run all night.

Of course, everyone wants traffic on their site – no one builds a website and hopes for no visitors. But even though you might think that your goal,or your measure of success, would be a large number of visitors, that isn’t really a goal, it’s the means to a goal.

People build websites for different reasons and always want traffic but they want targeted traffic, people who are interested in what’s on the site. If your visitors aren’t looking at the site then it doesn’t matter if you have a million visitors a day, it’s not helping you achieve anything worthwhile.

Another thing that struck me as wrong with the whole concept is the potential unscrupulous uses for such a service. If you are running ads on your site and get paid for impressions then it’s possible that a automatic hit service could increase your earnings. It’s also possible that using such a service to artificially inflate traffic could get you banned from the ad service.

Finally, it occurred to me that devious, or "black hat" SEO (search engine optimization) companies could offer guaranteed increase in traffic to a site and then use one of these services to inflate the numbers, tricking someone into believing that they are doing something good for you.

The bottom line is that I can’t think of a single positive use for these services and would strongly recommend against it.

Lisa Campbell is the owner of Kaediem Consulting Services based in the Oshawa Ontario area. Kaediem offers Affordable custom web and logo design with imagination and flair.

http://www.kaediem.com
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