Traffic Generation

By: Gill Taylor

Lets touch on four of the best free ways to get interested, focused traffic to your website. These four are probably the first you want to be looking at when your start promoting a new website. Their cheap, actually their free, and they work. Let’s have a peek!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that should really become second nature to anyone that has a website or blog. Google loves you guy, so make it easy to be loved. Give the search engine spiders what they want to see, and you will be seen.

EO can basically be divided into 2 parts:

On site SEO: this is what the spiders see on YOUR site. Make sure you have all the right keywords and relevant keyword phrases on all the right places. I like to think of this as a pyramid, I start at the top and include EVERY brick all the way to the bottom. The page title is your highest point, then all the headings, main body text and finally the meta tags. And of course remember to include Alt tags for all your images too, search engines don’t care for graphics all that much. If you feed the spiders with keywords they’ll bring you traffic as reward.

Of site SEO: This is more external stuff, some of which you cannot control and a good example would be the link your follower or friend has to your site, also called an anchor text link. Its nice when someone links to using your website keywords and also its good practice to link to someone with their relevant keywords. Of course the number and quality of inbound links to your site also count for a lot. ‘CNN good, your sisters Barbie website bad’ type of thinking.

Social Marketing
This could really bring in masses of focused traffic. Offer a helping hand, share some free content and resources. If you give people a reason to follow you, they will gladly oblige, and you’ll look like a good guy in the process, not just some slimy marketer.

What I can also strongly advise this: Don’t do what other people do; you want to stand out from the crowd. It’s never too early to start creating and promoting your own brand, so do it from day one. Stay active, this is true for your blog and your profile, consistency is very important, get into a habit of updating your blog and your Facebook or MySpace profile. People like to see development.

Forum marketing
It’s a lot like social marketing, only forums are discussing exactly what you want to promote or sell. You should start off slow, become part of the community and offer some advice and ideas to people, not just spamming or blandly promoting your products, everybody hates that. Remember to put a link in your digital signature and entice people with something valuable, entertaining or interesting to visit your site.

Article writing
I really like this one, and it works like a charm. Write high quality content articles and distribute it to the masses by submitting them to multiple article directories. You will reap your well earned rewards from the back links in the article or in your resource box. Keep your articles highly targeted and get your audience to go to your site. Remember that your article will stay on the web, so do some keyword research, just like the SEO we discussed, and include it in your title and body text.

So, start with these four suggestions every time you launch a new website and you could find your bank account bulging in no time at all! We’ll discuss all of these in much more detail very soon. Promise.

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com