Building Traffic
Once you have your website up and running, you need to get people to come to it. The old agage of build it and they will
come is not true in a world with millions of websites. There are ways to make your site stand out among the rest.
Search Engines
People search for millions of terms a day and you want to be in their listings. Everyone knows that Google, Bing and
Yahoo make up the lion share of the search market. You definitely want to be listed in these. You do that by submitting
to each one. Their spiders (programs that scour the web for sites and new content) will then index your page and list it.
The position in the listing is crucial. Being on page 43 is nowhere near as good as page 1 obviously. This is where SEO
comes in. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process by which you tweak elements of
your page in order to be more friendly to the spiders. Using particular keywords in the text and in title and meta tags
can be extremely helpful. Not hiding navigation links in a graphic is another. Pure flash sites are difficult to rank
because the spiders can't see the flash. Spiders can generally only see text. Finding out what the spider actually sees
when it visits your site can help a lot in tweaking it. Google provides some great webmaster tools to help you to do just
that. Just check in the More on Google's page for these free tools.
Links
Getting like minded inbound links really helps in not only the search engine rankings, but targetted traffic with people
who are interested in your subject. These links can be from other sites that share your interests, social networking
platforms like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others, forums, blogs, posts. One thing to stay away from though is the FFA
pages. They are usually directories that have a hundred links on each page. This can actually have a negative impact
on your rankings instead of a positive one. Another tip is to find links from sites that have a high Google PR. You can
find out what the page rank is with Google's toolbar (for the browser) or you can look up a site in the numerous free PR
tools available on the net.
To some first time webmasters, it seems sort of anti-productive to provide links to other sites. Why are you sending
traffic away from your site. But they will also do the same for you and thus you start relationships with various people
in your industry or genre. The more you reach out, the more reward you will get. Staying alone is going to hurt you a lot
in the long run.
Original Content
Fresh original content will help boost your traffic a lot. You should be prepared to add content as often as possible to
keep not only your visitors interested, but the search spiders as well. Having a frequently updated site sits quite well
with the rankings and can get you lots more traffic. And the word of mouth, like any business, doesn't hurt either.
Offline Advertising
Something many don't think of is just because a site is online, doesn't mean it is cut off from the real world. By putting
ads in local papers, TV, radio, handing out pamphlets, making signs, putting the address on a bumper sticker on your car, you advertise
your site. People will remember your domain if they see it in a unique place, get home and type it in. With the popularity
of internet capable phones, they may even check it out right there while waiting in line for coffee.
Viral Video and Article Marketing
Providing content to sites that specialize in publishing can also bring people to your site.
YouTube has exploded in
popularity and people have posted a ton of unique videos to get their site seen. Some have even turned viral like that
little kid in the dentist chair and the wedding procession to Chris Brown's music. This is a chance to be creative and
get good advertising for little or no money. And by featuring your domain name in the video, you can drive people who
want to see more of what you have to offer.
Articles work the same way. If you write up articles and submit them to places like EzineArticles.com and others, you put
information into the hands of the people and quality links for them to click. Articles are generally 400-500 words long
about whatever subject is pertinant to your site. If you aren't a good writer, there are plenty of freelance writers out
there that will write articles for around $5-10 an article.
The truth is that sites do need to be advertised just like anything else that you want to get out into the public. There
are literally hundreds of ways to do that. Use your imagination and the sky is the limit.