It is most important to know how to increase website traffic and start getting a growing number of visitors to your site. When you have set up your online business - whatever it is - you need customers in order to make money. The lifeblood of online business is traffic to your website or blog.
There are many ways you can attract website traffic and get visitors (and buyers) to your web pages. You can buy online traffic with the search engines or elsewhere and start to receive visitors almost instantly, or you can take the slower route generating free traffic to website. Knowing how to increase website traffic will help you to choose which means to use.
Free Website Traffic
Good Content is Vital
When it comes to generating free internet traffic from the search engines, the content of your web pages is the crucial part. The content is the bedrock of your site and definitely the most important single factor to generate traffic online.
People use Google and other search engines to find information or solve a problem. They want reliable, high quality information. If Google doesn't deliver what they want, they go to another search engine. Therefore, it's vital for Google (and the other engines) to provide the best information possible.
This is why you must have quality content on your website. The search engines are continously improving their ability to tell the quality content sites from the mediocre ones, and the best sites get the most traffic.
Be sure that the content of your web pages is unique, original - preferably written by yourself. Do not copy content from other websites; the engines recognize duplicate content and ignore it (or worse, your site might get penalized).
So, sit down and write quality content for your pages. It will cost you some time, and it will also take some time before you see the traffic start trickling in. However, this is a long term strategy that will attract online traffic for a long time and will pay off many, many times.
Using Keywords
In order to get targeted website traffic, you need to use keywords (the words people use when searching for information) on your pages. That way your content will be relevant to the visitors, and they are more likely to take an interest in what you offer. When talking about how to increase website traffic, keywords are a very central factor.
You will have a main keyword and a few secondary keywords for a page. Use the main keyword as the file name of the page, in the title tag, in the keywords tag and the description tag (which is often displayed on search results). Also use keywords in headlines when possible. Learn more about web page optimizing.
How to find good keywords and use them on your pages is a too wide topic to be covered in detail here, so see our What Are Keywords and Finding Keywords pages for an in-depth explanation. Knowing how to increase website traffic is crucial to any internet business.
Backlinks
In addition to good content and keywords on your pages, you need some backlinks (also called incoming or inbound links) - links on other sites pointing 'back' to your site. Such links give your website more importance in the eyes of the engines, and make them choose your site more often. Backlinks carry more weight the higher the sites they are linked back from are ranked (the more important they are regarded to be).
There is a number of ways and strategies to get backlinks to a website. Here is a list of the most important methods:
•Submit site to Web Directories
•Submit articles to Article Directories
•Commenting on blogs
•Participate in forums
•Link Exchanges
•Social Bookmarking
•RSS Feeds
If you feel that your efforts to increase online web site traffic don't pay off to any extent, be patient. It takes time for your site to mature and get ranked with the search engines.
Buy Website Traffic
If you don't have the time to create website traffic yourself, you can buy traffic to your website, if you have some dollars to spare. That way you will get visitors (and possibly earn money) instantly. The fastest way to get your word out is to advertise on Google and other search engines. However, there are also other online advertising options. Here are some common types of advertising:
•Search engines PPC (Pay Per Click) ads
•Other PPC advertising
•Ezine advertising
•Buy opt-in leads
•Cost per action (CPA) advertising
•Co-op advertising
Website Traffic Counter
In order to monitor the traffic to your website, you can get free website traffic statistics at StatCounter.com.
Remember, generating free traffic by filling your pages with quality content is a long term strategy that will provide you with an ever growing stream of visitors. Paid traffic stops the very moment you stop advertising!
Knowledge about how to increase website traffic is of utmost importance for your business. Get more traffic tactics and ideas on our Attracting Online Traffic pages.