subject: The Many Ways To Bring Traffic To Your Website [print this page] The Many Ways To Bring Traffic To Your Website
Traffic is the lifeblood of your website. You want it; you need it. How do you drive traffic to your site? Today you can attract all the traffic you want in many ways. Not surprisingly, some of these ways will cost you money while others are free but often require more of your time to set up.The best free methods and there are many of them, are about old-fashioned footwork updated for today. Time was people found your business by looking in the yellow pages under a heading, say, "Dentist". Today's equivalent of the yellow pages - sort of - are the search engines. When someone is looking for what you have to offer, he or she will turn to a search engine such as google.com, yahoo.com, or bing.com. Consequently, the search engines have to see your website in order to serve it up as a top ranked site. In other words, your primary strategies are optimization and links. Both of these approaches are fundamental and must be maintained on a constant basis to build your web presence.Optimization, known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is the way you help search engines find your site. Earlier, after finding "Dentist" in the yellow pages, you'd then look for dentists that specialize in children. Today those same search parameters are in the content of your site as keywords. Keywords exist at two levels on the web. The first is the natural use of important words in the content of a page: dentist, specialize, children, and so forth. The second level of optimization occurs in the Meta tags of the web page, text that only search engines read. These can include a wider range of search terms to catch searches that come from oblique angles. Someone may search for "dentist frightened child" and "frightened" or "scared" are words you might not want as keywords in your content, but they can still work for you in the meta tags, You might be tempted to stuff your content and meta tags with as many keywords as possible. Search engines though do recognize this strategy and will drop your site in rankings if they detect a preponderance of a specific term. Be realistic about keywords use them to maximize your ranking in search engine returns.The link to you website is your URL and you want this to be everywhere. Some search engines evaluate the number of links that connect back to your site to rank your site's standing on a search term. The short of this is - get your link posted on other sites. To accomplish this, you want to list your URL on as many non-competitive websites as possible. Build a links page on your site and post links to other sites of interest. Ways to achieve this include swapping links with other sites that want your site link on their links page, commenting on blogs and including your link as part of your signature in all your emails, writing articles for other sites that allow you to list your URL in the credits.Building and fine-tuning your SEO and getting your link on as many other websites as possible are fundamental to being seen by search engines, which route traffic to your site.
