How Do I Get More Traffic To My Website?

Posted by jerry as Internet Promotion

Increasing Traffic To Your Web Site

There are now tens of billions of web pages on the Internet. Driving traffic to your site can be very difficult. This post is meant to serve as a basic primer to increasing the amount of traffic on a site.

Sources of Traffic

There are a few ways that web surfers can end up on your site:

• Traditional advertising
  • This can be Television commercials, bumper stickers, T shirts, etc.
• Online Advertising
  • Target relevant key words for your site in an ad campaign using a service such as Google Adwords.
• Search Engine Results
  • Visitors are directed to your site after searching for a term.
• Link From Another Site
  • Visitors find your site by way of a link from another site.

Not all of these methods will be appropriate for all types of sites, or all budgets.

Traditional advertising

Posting yard signs with a short teaser phrase and a web site around town has become a very common practice in advertising.

Order some T shirts and other items from Cafe Press with your site address and logo. A very effective idea is to order some tight T shirts for female friends & family to wear.

Bumper stickers, trinkets, etc can be ordered with logos and web addresses to use as give away advertising. Cafe Press also provides these.

Television and radio advertisements can get quite involved. A company called Spot Runner has emerged that allows the for the easy & cheap purchase of advertising time.

Online Advertising

There are many options for advertising online. The basic concept is that you “buy” keywords from ad networks, who will display your add on search results pages when that key word is searched for, or when a page related to your keyword is displayed.

The two most popular online ad programs are:

Google Adwords

Yahoo Sponsored Search

There are many, many others that have different programs and different features.

Search Engine Results

Ranking well in search engine results for a popular key word can drive high volumes of traffic to a site. The best part of search engine referred traffic is that it’s free!

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that ranking highly on search engine results pages can be extremely difficult.

There are a few general factors that impact the placement of a site in search engine results:

• Quality of the content on the site
• Links from other sites, where more authoritative sites count more.
• Rate of change of the content
• Age of the domain being used

Link From Another Site

Having a link to a site placed on the front page of Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Fark, and others, will generate a large volume of traffic for a short time.  Done well, posts on the front pages of these sites will generate discussion or controversy on other sites that will, in turn, link to the promoted site having the additional benefit of improving search engine placement.

While the traffic generated from these sites can be great, it is important to understand a few things:

• Unless you are using a technique that is “cheating your way to the top”, a promoted site must have content and a look & feel worthy of being on the front page of these sites.
• If you are “cheating your way to the top”, the success will be short lived, and you will have to deal with being banned and any future submissions from the promoted site will have a much harder time rising to the top.
• The traffic volume is good, but will quickly decay, due to the nature of these sites wanting to get new and interesting content to the front pages.
• Know your audience and plan accordingly.  The readers of these sites tend to be very technology savvy, and are sick of looking at ads.  Most readers of these sites use ad blocking software, potentially rendering the effort to promote a site worthless.  These types of visits should be viewed as “getting the word out”, not a source of income.