subject: 4 Proven Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website [print this page] 4 Proven Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website
4 Proven Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Site and Get More Mileage for Your Efforts - Article
If you have a website, congratulations! If youre like many, you probably thought that you would create a site and visitors would start pouring in. Unfortunately, thats not how it works. You need to generate traffic which is not as easy as you might think. Although millions of people use the Internet, there are also millions of competing sites to choose from. If you want to attract a share of these prospects its going to take some effort on your part. To get you started here are a few ideas that you can use to increase traffic and also improve your sites search engine ranking.
1. Build an Interesting Website with Lots of Great Content!
The build it and they will come school of thought doesn't work with websites. However, if your site has a good amount of content and is optimized correctly, then each one of those pages will include targeted keywords and phrases. These phrases will then match the phrases people use making searches. On the other hand, if you have only published a one-page website, then there will not be much "food for the spiders" on your site. If there are not as many phrases for search engines to include in their data base, and you will get less traffic from search engine queries.
An added benefit of building a site that is high on content is that other sites will link to your site because they believe it to be an important resource. Incoming links have always been an important part of the Google ranking system. Google considers these links to be votes for your site, which boosts your search engine placement.
2. Publish Some of Your Content on Article Sharing Websites
This is a super effective way to build traffic. If your articles are full of useful material, then other people might want to include this information on their websites. Webmasters are always in need of content to enhance their sites. Because your articles include an author bio section with a link to your site, this gives you more backlinks and more traffic from the people who click on these links.
Here are a few places where you can offer your content. Just make sure that you put your URL and contact information in the bio box of each article.
Here are a couple of article directories to get you started:
ArticlesBase
http://www.ArticlesBase.com
GoArticles
http://www.GoArticles.com
ArticleCity
http://www.ArticleCity.com
3. Optimize Your Site
If you've taken the time to create good content now you need to optimize your site to improve your ranking in the search engines. If your content is not optimized it will not get the exposure that it should.
Your search engine ranking can be improved by including your keyword phrases in the title tag, the description tag, in your sites headlines, and in the anchor text of the links on your web pages.
If you optimize these on-page factors properly, then your search engine ranking for a particular keyword or keyword phrase will increase dramatically.
Off-page factors include the number of high quality, incoming backlinks to your site. As mentioned earlier, your ranking is partly determined by how many other websites link to your site. If you have published your material elsewhere, then you should get a good amount of important links. You can also post comments on other related blogs and forums.
4. Google Places
What if you only have a simple one or two page site? An excellent way to achieve placement on Google's first page is with a Google Places listing. This is one of the fastest ways to get to the top of Google. However, while the map for a particular city and industry term may contain hundreds of listings, only 7 of them will make it to the first page of Google. For that reason, you may want to hire a professional who knows Googles guidelines and who knows how to get your listing to appear on Googles first page.
Use these four techniques and you are sure get noticed and get more traffic!
