Some Ideas for Driving Traffic to Your Website

Some Ideas for Driving Traffic to Your Website

Does it seem overwhelming to think about the vast amount of information and the rapidly increasing number of websites on the Internet today? If you’re doing business on the Internet, developing a steady stream of web site traffic is very important.  Here are just a few ideas for driving traffic to your website.

There are many ways to promote your web site and develop traffic and this brief article will focus on some of the simplest and the most effective marketing techniques. Search engine optimization for strong organic search engines positioning (within top 30 results) can be considered to be yet another marketing technique. However, all of the strategies mentioned below ultimately overlap into an overall marketing strategy that will hold search engine optimization as a core objective.

Google Adwords (and other Pay-Per-Click)
Pay-Per-Click provides a simple way to purchase targeted text ads. These are the highlighted ads at top of Google results pages and scattered in many various positions on any web site that subscribes to Google Adsense. Adwords can be a very effective method for generating traffic to your web site and is the equivalent of advertising, where you pay only when you see the desired result (i.e., someone clicks through to your web site).

Google AdWords enables you to have complete control over your ad and how much you’d like to spend. You can open an account with a credit card and with no minimum deposit required. Once placed, your ad can begin running almost immediately.

AdWords has traditionally been considered a cost-effective advertising solution the recently, pay-per-click rates have been increasing steadily. I’ll always recommend that clients consider only targeted keyword campaigns and avoid general keywords that will generate less desirable traffic that could become costly.

Internet Forums
Participating in forums that are related your business or your market can be another effective way to bring traffic to your web site. Regardless of the type of business you’re promoting, chances are there are online forums and communities of people who share your interest.

Ideally, you should select forums that are well established, spam free, moderated, and have a lot of active members. It is also useful to look the forms that have a signature line allows you to place your web site URL as a link.

Participating in forums has a number of benefits:

• -  You can potentially receive traffic from those who read your posts.
• -  If the forum allows signature files, you will receive inbound links to your web site, which will positively affect your page rank.
• -  You will build trust and credibility and open potential new networks for your business marketing.
• -  Importantly, you’ll have access to other perspectives and the expertise of other professionals.

Writing and Publishing Articles

Writing and publishing articles in your area of expertise can be a very effective method for promoting your business online.

The concept is simple. Many webmasters are continually on the lookout for new content. If you can provide some useful content for these web sites, you will often be rewarded with a link back to your own web site.

Writing and publishing articles has a number of benefits:

• -  You can develop a steady stream of traffic from those who read your articles and follow your links.
• -  Again, you will receive inbound links to your web site, which will help increase your page rank.
• -  You will build your reputation as an expert in your field.
• -  Developing articles can be inexpensive; and even free if you have the time and writing ability.

If you don’t have the time or if you aren’t confident in your ability to write your own articles, the copywriting staff at Web Design Edge will be pleased to assist you.

Online Magazine Advertising
Online Advertising can be an effective form of grants the advertising and can also be very inexpensive depending upon the size of the publication.

The key to using online magazine advertising effectively is to target your audience and track your response. You must test the effectiveness of both your ad and the publication in which you’re advertising. This will enable you to determine which ads are pulling the most response and which publications are providing you with a high response rate.

The Directory of Ezines (http://www.directoryofezines.com) provides a complete online searchable database of Ezines that accept advertising. This directory contains the information you’ll need to know to effectively place your ads, for a small fee.

This list of strategies is far from complete but should provide a good start for some ideas for obtaining additional traffic for your web site, even when it may seem like a daunting task.

Top 10 Ways to Attract Web Traffic

The beauty of creating a blog is that you can add it to your current web site or use it as a stand alone website. If you don't constantly market your blog you won't attract many visitors or make many sales.

Here are the top 10 ways to attract web traffic to your blog:

1. Add fresh content

If you consistently add new content you will not only attract regular readers but also the search engines. Try to add new content to your blog at least 3 times a week.

2. Optimize your content

Make sure you optimize the titles, paragraphs and links within your content. This means you must first do keyword research to incorporate keywords related to your content.

3. Include keywords in your tags

WordPress allows you to include tags below each post. Place your most popular keywords in these tags separated by commas.

4. Add meta tags

Use the headspace or seopack plugin to add title and description meta tags to each post. Search engines place great emphasis on title tags that contain your keyword at the beginning.

The description meta tag is what visitors read about your site when they find it in the search engines. Make sure the description of your page will get the reader to click to your content.

5. Create internal links

An individual post won't get much traction in the search engines unless you get links pointing to it. If you have related content from other areas of your blog create a text link (anchor text) within that post that links to your current content.

Your blog post ranking will increase in proportion to the number of links pointing to it.

6. Encourage commenting

Include questions within your content and encourage readers to leave a comment. This increases blog interactivity. Readers will see it's an active blog and will want to read the comments and provide their own feedback.

7. Leave comments on other blogs

Find blogs that have content related to your own and write a comment that compliments their post or is in response to others' comments. With each comment include a link back to your own blog.

8. Use trackbacks

A trackback is a procedure for notifying the original blog poster that you have linked to their blog post from your blog. Create lots of trackbacks to popular blog posts from your own blog. This will encourage those you trackback to do the same for you and will increase traffic to your site.

9. Submit to blog directories

Google "top directories to submit your blog" to get a free list of the top 100+ blog directories you can submit your blog to.

10. Submit RSS Feed to RSS Directories

To submit your blog or RSS feed to a list of RSS and blog directories, Google "top rank RSS blog directories."

Blog marketing is a process that must be done consistently to reap great benefits. By employing the strategies mentioned above you'll see a steady flow of web traffic that will increase over time.