Several weeks ago I spent a good few hours finding blog directories with decent traffic to submit my blog to. Now it is time to see what sort of results there has been in terms of traffic from these directories.

I have submitted http://www.blogtonomy.com/ and http://newsniche.com/ to a handful of blog dig directories. These are directories that list blogs themselves rather than their RSS feeds. The aim of exercise is to see if this generates any traffic back to these sites.

The source of referrals that have been used to track results are from log analysers looking at my raw logs and a third party page tracking service. This should give a more balanced view of actual traffic. The reason for this is that different software seems to report different results, these difference in these result can sometimes be quite startling.

Now for results. So far only two directories have contributed any traffic back to my site. In both cases I think traffic was generated from new listings areas of directories. The numbers of referrals are few, I do not expect much more traffic to be generated in future as my sites are no longer listed in new listings section.

Search engine optimization is still my number one traffic generator. I receive more traffic from Google than any other source on internet. But it is becoming increasingly more and more difficult to achieve a top ten placement on Google or any other search engine as internet grows and more webmasters compete for same key words. There once was a time when I could rely on Google to provide me with all traffic I needed but not any more. I need to promote and advertise my web site elsewhere if I expect to continue receiving good quality traffic to my web site.

Writing articles like this one is just one of ways I use to promote my web site. There are literally thousands of sites on internet that will allow you to submit articles such as this one. Your article will remain in their database or directory and as long as you allow re-print instructions along with your author bio you may also see your article on other sites that you did not even submit to. Make sure your web site URL is in your author bio and make sure URL is active. Some sites will only post your article with static URL’s which will not be quite as effective. You can also use anchor text for your URL to help your search engine rankings. Use your targeted key words as your anchor text and you should see an increase in your search engine optimization efforts.

Number three on my list of web site promotions requires some cash. The majority of people I talk to about getting good quality traffic to a web site all want to do it for FREE without any advertising dollars spent. Although it is possible to promote a web site for FREE with no money, I highly recommend some form of pay per click campaign using Google adwords or Yahoo search marketing (formerly Overture). There are also a host of other smaller pay per click engines that I have used in past including Findwhat and 7Search.