So you have set up your website, hosted it with a web hosting company and it's now live on the World Wide Web. The key question now is how do you generate traffic to your site?
There are various ways of promoting your site and generating traffic to your site. Let us look at some of these:
1. Use Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves getting your website picked up as high as possible in search engine results pages. Examples of such search engines are Google, Yahoo, Msn etc.
A search engine is a site that enables a user to search for information by entering a term, clicking a button and enabling a database containing information on millions of websites to return a page of results in response to the query.
A large number of people around the world use Google nowadays, and getting your site ranked up there when anyone types in key words relating to your business is very likely to generate traffic to your site.
2. Have linkages of your site on other sites
Linking strategy is an important part of generating traffic to your site. One way of doing this is to get other sites to link to you by offering to them and asking the other site to return the favour. You can offer the other site tips or very interesting content that they want to send visitors to your site.
You can also pay for other sites to link to you. If the other site is well established or when you type in your key words on the search engine it always comes up first, then it might be beneficial linking your site to that site.
You could link to websites of companies that are your partners, sites with industry information and also web sites about products that are used with your own. With such linkages, you can attract potential customers to your site.
3. Buy Traffic
Google Adwords, Yahoo sponsored search and other companies can connect you with potential customers by offering a Pay per click service. The way this works is that you have a list of key words that is applicable to your website and your business.
You then buy these keywords on search engines which help to make sure that your website is listed on the first page when someone searches for words that are relevant to your website.
The thing here is budget, because most websites will charge more for the most popular keywords.
If you are looking to find useful keywords for your site, then Google Adsense is one of the largest online advertising programs that you can use.
4. Promote your website with social networking sites
This is another way in which you can drive traffic to your site. Luckily, the likes of Facebook, twitter, myspace, friendster etc. can make your job a whole lot easier.
What you do here is register and build a community of online friends and include your web address in your online profile. This potentially can help drive traffic to your site, as far as you are not overly pushy about it.
5. Join forums and Discussion groups
This is an indirect way of potentially generating traffic to your site. What you do is take part actively in forums and discussion groups. There are many of them out there, all you need to do is look for the forums and discussion boards that are relevant to your website or business and join.
When you participate in forums or discussion boards, you have to be seen to be someone that gives honest answers to questions posed by other people in the forum or discussion board.
You can include a link to your site when someone asks a question on the forum or discussion board that you feel you know the answer to, or that your products or services on your website can answer the question.
Just asking people directly to visit your website can get you banned from the forum or discussion board, so be aware of that.
Generating traffic to your website is something you should constantly be working on, on a day to day basis.
Even the top search engine optimisation organisations come up with hundreds or thousands of key words and then they track the results of these key words to see which ones customers click on the most and which to cancel off.
This is also a strategy you can use, because you only get charged on the key words that were clicked on.
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