Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Increase Your Website's Traffic Flow Using These 6 tips -3

Traffic is absolutely the most essential thing to maintaining a successful internet based business (aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell). Traffic is the lifeblood of any website. Generating a steady traffic flow is an absolute necessity to your websites health and longevity.

If you don't have a website yet, just be advised that once you're finished making the site that your work doesn't stop there. You must then get started on generating traffic to your new site. If you already have created a website then you may want to do more research into getting a lot more traffic. If you are involved in a very competitive business area then you should always be a step ahead of your competition. Working on increasing the traffic flow to your website should have been done already.

Timing is essential and generating traffic should always be on your mind concerning your website. Do you ever wonder how the "major" websites drive traffic to their site? Most of those larger companies are spending a lot of money to drive the traffic to their websites by investing in all sorts of advertising campaigns and other types of online marketing.

You don't have to follow their lead because you probably don't have their resources but there are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to lose your shirt over it. To help you out in generating more traffic for your website, I have listed six surefire ways to increase your traffic starting right now.

1) Link Exchange

When exchanging links with other sites, both of you will benefit from the efforts to further enhance your websites traffic. This is a proven method, although it is very time consuming. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with other websites so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. The more links traded with more sites the more traffic could be expected.

Keep in mind, a major prerequisite in exchanging links with other websites is having the same niche, or content area as the site you are swapping links with. The swapping sites should share a common subject area providing service and information that interests your targeted traffic on both sites of the link.

Exchanging links with other websites also boosts your chances of getting a higher page rank in the search engine results. It is common knowledge that most search engines rank sites that have many inbound (related) links higher than those that have only a few links. With a good ranking position in the search engines, you will generate more traffic in your website as well.

I will add one important aside to the link exchange process. As I have said before, this can be very time consuming. Also, you want to link with only quality sites - not with every site you can find that is in no way related to your websites topic area - and never with link farms! So, link exchanging is a good method to use - if you do it wisely.

2) Use proper keywords or keyword phrases

When visitors are looking for something online they almost always go to the search engines. What do they do when they get there? They enter a term into the search engine - this is what they are looking for, or want to find more information about. (These are called keywords). Search engines take these keywords, look for those items that the user typed into the search engine and then show the user a results page. Having the right keyword or keyword phrases on your site is one of the biggest requirements in ranking in high in those search engine results.

3) Write and Submit Articles

One good way to get more traffic to your website is by writing articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write many articles about an area you have a lot of expertise in so that visitors will both learn from your knowledge and will be eager to go to your site to learn more. If you sell computer parts online write press releases and articles about computer parts. If you have a website about car parts then write press releases and articles about cars and car parts. You get the idea.

It is easy to find a lot of e-zine directories on the net that provide free space for all your articles to be distributed. If you want to save money, then write the articles yourself. If you don't want to do it yourself there are many freelance writers out there who are willing to write for you - for a small fee. Once you've written an article the next step you need to do is to submit it to several article directories - you can find them everywhere on the internet. Tip: include a short biography at the end of your article that links the article back to your own sites. Include a little information about yourself and your site.

4) Create a Newsletter

Offer a newsletter on your website about the topic of your website. This is a great way to widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list of visitors that regularly visit your website. It also builds a rapport with your customers and gives you more opportunity to build a relationship with your visitors.

5) Invest in good advertising

Google Adwords and Yahoo both provide great advertising methods that are both truly popular and assures great traffic. Using this method will cost you some money, however. Many people shy away from spending money to increase their overall traffic.

Lastly,

6) Join forums, create online communities

Again, this does require your time. Share your opinions and knowledge with others on the forum. As your reputation builds on the forum you also build the reputation of your website. Not only do you share your knowledge and expertise but you also get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche as your site.

Find a market and share your expertise and your credibility will grow. Once you create a good foundation for you and your site, people will learn to trust you and your site and will probably pass your information on to many other people who are also interested in that particular topic. Your traffic will certainly increase as a result.

Each of the six methods discussed above will help drive more traffic to your web site over time. Learn all you can about the methods listed above, start doing as many of them as you can with your website right now and you will soon have a better traffic flow to your website. All it takes is a bit of effort and your own investment of time to get the traffic generation process started to your website.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very interesting post. Informative tips, I'd like to try Adwords and Yahoo.

Regards
SAPexpert