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Increase Online Traffic – Great Ways to Get More Website Traffic
That being said, just how do you get more targeted traffic? If you are on a budget you may be more interested in free methods to drive more traffic to your site. After you are more successful, you may want to investigate paid methods. On the other hand, you may well be successful enough with free traffic sources.
1) Get more links in
Traffic to your site will come from two sources; search engine results pages (SERPs) and links on other sites back to yours. In fact, those links back to your site do far more than generate traffic to your site. They play a primary role in garnering better search engine rankings as well. That being the case, a solid linking strategy is one of the single best things you can do. You’ll be rewarded with robust traffic from both the links themselves and the search engine results they help generate.
Here are some great ways you can get links to your site.
A) Ask other site owners – this isn’t as easy as when the web was young. There is more crap out there today and site owners are less likely to give you a link just for the asking. If you do ask for a link, send them the preformatted html code. Not only will it be easier for them, but it will allow you to achieve specific search engine benefits, as I discuss in greater detail below. Be professional when you ask. Remember they’re established, and you’re not.
B) Write articles – This is a powerful strategy that can get you many links from authority sites for nothing but some time spent writing. You want original articles, either ones you’ve written yourself, or those you paid someone else to write for you and you retain the exclusive rights to. You can submit these to article directories, such as ezinearticles.com, articledashboard.com and goarticles.com.
Other site owners and ezine publishers that want content can then syndicate the articles. You’re given a resource box where you can put information about your company, yourself or any other information that may entice people to visit your site. You get to include the all important link back to your site to facilitate the whole thing. Not only will the article give you a link, but it will help establish you as an expert in your field, giving people yet another reason to visit your site.
C) Submit your site to directories, such as Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org). These will get you traffic on their own, and are viewed as authority sites by the search engines. Always remember, you want to link with a dual purpose in mind; search engine juice and the traffic generated by the links themselves.
D) Blogging. A blog can be a great way to get links. One of my blogs has over 1,400 links in to it from other blogs, and that doesn’t count websites linking to it. Many bloggers have far more than that. It is kind of like the good old days when the web was young…. I digress. You can use a blog as a great marketing tool, to showcase your products or services or pass along information related to your business. It helps you build a community, something that’s extremely valuable. After all, business is about relationships, and a blog is a great relationship builder. You can build some long lasting relationships and get some great links to your main site at the same time.
2) Make the link structure correct
You want as many links in to your site as possible, but you can’t just go getting links willy nilly from anywhere. The search engines, and Google in particular, look for two main things when evaluating how the link will affect your site’s ranking; the authority of the page your link comes from, and the link’s anchor text. The anchor text is the text that is actually displayed that you click on in the link. It’s essential that the keywords that you’re trying to get ranked for are in the anchor text. Don’t just use the name of your site as the anchor text. That’s a terrible waste. Who cares if your site is well ranked for it’s own name?
For example, if you have a site on digital camera accessories, you don’t want to have the links that point to your site just be www.yoursite.com. You’ll get minimal benefit from that. Instead link to the page with the terms that you want to found for. In this case, you might have a page on SD memory cards. You’d like people who are looking for SD cards to buy them from you, right? In most cases, the more specific, the better. As an example you’d make the link so that the anchor text would read “1MB SD memory cards”.
You want to do a little keyword research first to find our exactly which phrases people are actually searching for. Wordtracker or Google’s keyword tool are great for this. You can then match your anchor text to the exact search terms people are typing into the search engines. That’s not just good for you from a search engine perspective. It gives value to your visitors, because you are actually giving them exactly what they’re searching for.
You should do everything with an eye toward value for your website’s visitors. The more valuable you make their visit, the more likely they are to make visiting your site a regular occurrence and tell others about it. If they own a website, they may even give you a link. The more value you can provide to your visitors, the easier it will be for you to get links from complementary sites, establish affiliate relationships, and form a long term bond with your visitors. Ask any marketing expert; it’s much easier to retain visitors and customers than it is to generate new ones.
Remember, give it time. In a few months or so you can start to see the fruits of you labor pay off. Stick with it, it will pay off. Persistence was the missing ingredient in many failed businesses.
