| Scripts are at the heart of internet operations and yet very few people know how they can be used to increase the amount of traffic they receive. This is probably because most website owners believe that scripts are too complicated and technical to be bothered with. 'Leave it to the experts!' is what most people say. However, don?t miss out on this opportunity. Scripts can be a very effective way to drive traffic to your website and help you promote your business. What are scripts? Most of the stuff you find in the internet are electronic data. They can only be converted to actual materials if they are downloaded, printed or played. Since it will be impossible to manipulate stuff on the internet using manual means, it's important that tasks are electronically run and made automatic. Which makes scripts extremely important. Scripts are tiny programs that automate many of the tasks found in the internet. They rule many of the operations performed here, from keyword input to data entry to the ubiquitous visitor counter. They also perform many of the stuff we take for granted, such as make fonts and colors different, produce sound and motion and allow online interaction. Common script languages are ASP, Perl, PHP, CGI and VisualBasic, among others. How scripts can drive traffic to your website Scripts can be very useful for a site, depending on what they can do. Let's take a commonly used script called the referral script as an example. This script allows your visitors to refer a friend (or two) to you, usually for subscriptions or invites. What it does is it collects information such as the visitor's name, e-mail address and his referral's e-mail address. The script can then be programmed to send a notification such as an e-mail message to the recipient. This is the same script that works each time you receive an e-mail notifying you that a friend of yours referred some sort of internet service or product to you. Since the script was designed to cleverly make use of your friend's name, you will not treat the e-mail message as spam. You'll check it out and if it perks your interest, even click on the link to go to the website where the e-mail came from. As a result, the script caused you to become a visitor to its mother website. This is just one of the many scripts you can use to drive traffic to your site. There are others that function as form generators, link expirators and queue managers. If designed and utilized well, scripts can increase your popularity and give you the type of traffic that will make you the envy of other website owners. How to use scripts to send traffic to your site First of all, learn them. If not, at least understand how they work. You don?t have to create them yourself, though because there are plenty of scripts available online that you can use for free or at a small cost. You simply have to copy the script and paste it on the appropriate location in your web page. Next, choose the script carefully. Not all scripts are created alike and while it might seem tempting to get as many as you can to use in your website, that won't guarantee that you'll drive traffic to your site. Instead, take a good look at your website and determine what type of scripts it will benefit from. For example, it would be useless to use a script that functions as a countdown if your website isn?t doing any time-limited promotions and ad campaigns. Or if you're not using any forms anywhere in your site, why install a script that lets you generate fill-out forms? Choose only those scripts that will make it easy for your visitors to use your site and thus, drive good traffic to it. Otherwise, these little programs will just clutter your web pages. |