If you love using smileys, the built in library for most instant messengers/email programs might not be enough. Luckily, there are a few resources on the web which allow you to access, use and share thousands of smileys and emoticons.

One interesting tool even allows you to create your own smiley face clip art!

Just remember, 90% of human communication is non verbal! So it’s very natural for us to use images to convey emotions, feelings, and messages in general, especially on the internet where face to face communication is not possible.

Just something to think about next time you type LOL.

1.  Direct word of mouth traffic – This is the traffic from your mail signatures, forum messages, telling your friends etc.
2.  Organic traffic – This would be the traffic from search engines when people search for your keywords and visit your website.
3.  Paid traffic – This is the traffic you paid for, things like paid emails or paid to surf or paid to click programs (like adwords)

It is very obvious that you need sustained organic traffic, as the others will be very limited.

Take an example, suppose you would like to explore tips about fishing. What do you do? Do you randomly type fishingtips.com on your browser? What you do, and this is true for everyone else, is you go to a search-engine, type your keyword (in this case fishing tips) and visit a few websites that are listed on top. Have you ever explored the 30th page result from the search query? I guess not. I suppose you are realizing the importance of ranking high in search engines. Obviously, getting to the top position for a particular keyword takes lot of hard work. I will explore a few ways to get your website listed within the first few results for your keyword.

Three main points you need to consider are the following.

*      Unique and regularly updated content
*      Search engine optimization (SEO)
*      Link building

I will cover each of these in individual posts on this site. Just search around if they arent visible in the links on the right.

I won’t go into the details on all the SEO techniques, as a simple search would point you to many websites that provide that information for free.

But all the tips I have been giving you so far are mostly geared towards SEO. I will list a few important SEO tactics. This is obviously not an exhaustive list.

*      Always have a sitemap ready. There are free wordpress plugins that generate a sitemap. Having a sitemap is really important as a search engine would have a link to all the pages of your website and can also index them and not miss any due to a bad link or no link. This makes your website well structured.

*      Do not use javascripts or images to display your content as search engines spiders cannot view them. If you must have images, always write the content in the alt tag along with your keyword.

*      Make sure you interlink articles on your website. Also get external websites to link to your website, we will discuss this a little later.

* Have a plugin for social exchange medias. Having an icon saying ‘Digg it’ will make it easier for visitors to share your article.

* Use meta tags for adding keywords to the site. The all in one SEO plugin is great for this. If you are not using wordpress then add these tags manually.

* Always use the page title as the main keyword for that page and for your website. You can separate different tags using ‘|’.

* Always focus your attention on search phrases. For instance, people are more likely to search for ‘vacation destinations’ rather than just ‘vacations’.

* If you are linking to external websites (affiliate links), either link an internal page and make it redirect it to your affiliate page or use the ‘rel= “nofollow” ’ tag. The first option is always better because this will mask the link and keep from people stealing your affiliate commissions by putting their own affiliate ids in the link.

* Make sure your articles have good keyword density. But at the same time, do not overdo it. It’s best to have your keywords or slight variations of it about 3-4 times in an article that is 500 words long.

* Avoid frames, Ajax or flash content. These are bad for seo as they cannot be linked directly.

* Always write for your users, not for search engines. Search engines might just bring you a visitor, but if your content is not great, he will not stay, let alone buy something.

* Optimize your articles for one particular keyword, which could be a variation of your main keyword.

* Optimize the text in your feeds as well. Do not forget to put your affiliate links in RSS feeds.

* Use permanent/absolute links to your web pages. That is make your url’s, search engine friendly. A page id camping-spots-in-florida.html is better than page154.html.

* Surround your images and videos with keyword heavy descriptions.

* If you are getting external links, always ensure that they are using your keyword as anchor text. Vary the keyword a bit for different links so as to not appear as automatic links/spam links.

* Do not sell too many links on your website, you might incur a penalty.

* Do not forget to add your description in the description meta tags.

There are probably a thousand tricks for optimization, but what you learn from your experiences are probably the best. What you learn from one website can be easily applied to the other. For now, concentrate on the above mentioned points and you are good to go.

If after a month of writing articles, you still cannot see traffic from search engines, then you are probably missing some point. You can hire webmasters to look at your website and give you pointers. These are often for free, and occasionally for a very low cost. Experienced web developers can point out exactly what is happening with your website and why it is not ranking where you expect it to be. But if you follow the techniques I have mentioned, you will be getting volumes of traffic from search engines.

Email your friends and family about your new website, they always recommend the website to their friends and so on. Personal contacts are always a good way of generating traffic. On a similar note, always have an ‘Email this to your friend’ button on your website, so that a visitor can send your entire article to his friend with just one click.

Use paid clicks to generate initial revenue for your website. For instance if you invest about $50 on ppc programs, this might generate say 1000 clicks, even if 1% of your traffic is converted to sales, that means 10 people are buying something. Assuming you have a $10 product, that’s an easy $100 for you. Use this only initially, and reduce your paid campaigns as time progresses.

Though not a SEO technique, it’s always good to have a privacy policy and terms of conditions page. This shows professionalism (not to forget two additional pages for search engines) and it is important if you want to become or are on the way to becoming an authoritative website in your niche.

Use local advertising media to generate a few sales, use websites like craigslist and ebay to reach even more customers.

If things are going well, sponsor an event, this will generate good traffic to your website and will also lead to its credibility.

Time and again, run a contest on your website, anything fun and easily doable on your website. For instance if you have a hangman website, run a contest for the best scorer of the month. You will see your traffic grow exponentially.

If you are selling products, do not write fake testimonials. Use a guestbook so users can send and see their comments in real time. This adds credibility to your website.

Reviewing a product (adding an affiliate link) is a great method of adding fresh content and adverting something at the same time. For example: if you have a website about web hosting, review a few webhosts and add their affiliate links. Many websites pay about $50 per referral.

Do not forget to submit your website feed to RSS directories and various blog directories.