Ways to Increase Website Traffic

Free Methods to Increase Website Traffic

There are many free ways to bring more traffic to your website. Some of them work well, some of them don't. Some of them work well only if you do them a certain way. Some of them work well only in certain niches and markets. Let's try to sort this all out.

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• Content

  Without content, your website is nothing. Perhaps the very best return on investment (ROI) is to build quality, relevant content for your visitor. In other words, it's ultimately the best way to increase website traffic. What is content? Well, website content is comprised of anything that provides information that is of value to your visitor. Primarily when we think of content, we talk about text, but it can be in the format of images, audio, video, or other format.

  Building more words into a page provides more keywords for the search engines to chew on, and building more pages builds more page rank for your site. Content building is a labor-intensive yet profitable long term strategy for increasing website traffic.

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• Links

  Links are essential for increasing website traffic. Without links, your website will have less credibility, both with your visitors, and the search engines. If your visitors and the search engines trip over links to your pages left and right your site will gain credibility, Page Rank, traffic, and will be reindexed more often.

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• Blogging

  Blogging has it's advantages, as well as a few disadvantages, but overall can do wonders to bring traffic to your site. Remembering that content is a great way to build traffic, blogs can be great for this. Blogs are generally easy to set up and put content on.

  Blogs have the potential to acquire links quite quickly, encourage a sense of community, and typically have an informal style. They also lend themselves well to promotion via RSS, and can add visitor generated content to your site. In addition, you can have an onsite blog, an offsite blog, or you can guest blog. You should note that although blogs are easy to add content to, they tend to need more frequent updating than static web pages.

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• Guest Blogging

  Guest blogging opportunities can be either paid or unpaid. What is guest blogging? Well, it's pretty much how it sounds. You contribute blog entries (as opposed to simply posting blog comments) to someone else's blog. If a blogger has a more popular site than yours, it may be beneficial for you to guest blog on their site. This not only allows you gain exposure, but you are usually allowed to create a link back to your site. There are a number of blogging networks that will actually pay you to blog on their site. They get fresh content for their visitors and the search engines, and you get exposure, traffic, and a link back to your site for SEO purposes.

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• Social Bookmarking

  Social bookmarking is a great way to generate high powered links back to your site and increase search engine placement, thereby provding both a direct and indirect increase in traffic. Basically, instead of keeping your bookmarks to yourself, you can share them with the rest of the world by posting them to a social bookmarking site.

  There are many social bookmarking sites now that you can take advantage of, and use to propel your site forward. The most popular of these is probably Del.icio.us, and is probably the best site to use to generate traffic. If you can get a link to your site on the first page of Del.icio.us it can drive large amounts of traffic.

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• Other Social Media

  In addition to social bookmarking, there are a host of social media sites as well. They work in various ways. Mahalo.com, for example, says that they are the "world's first human-powered search engine." Stumbleupon.com says that you can "channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar" and as it learns what you like, it will make better recommendations.

  Digg and Reddit allow visitors to vote submitted sites up and down, but Stirrdup only allows you to vote them up, leaving those pages that are disliked ignored. Any or all of these social media sites can bring traffic, and many of them can provide a very high powered backlink to your site.

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• Other Web 2.0 Methods

  Social bookmarking and social media fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella label, but I thought they deserved their own categories. There are perhaps some other sites or methods that deserve their own list entries as well, but for now, I'll sumarize them here. I use these sites mainly for the backlinks, and only secondarily for branding, traffic, and exposure.

  Two of the most popular sites in this category are Squidoo and Hubpages, and they compete directly for attention. There are also some others, such as newsvine.com that are worth looking into if you feel your niche would fit.

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• Article Marketing

  Article marketing is one of my favorites. Partly because I used to be horrible at it and thought it didn't work, only to find out it's still one of the most powerful website promotion methods around. If anyone tells you article marketing doesn't work, then they aren't doing it correctly. I've made it an even more powerful way to increase website traffic by combining my article techniques with social bookmarking and social media.

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• Forums

  Finding niche related forums and posting useful information, especially in response to questions can be a great way to get traffic. For those forums that allow a link in your signature to your site, you may also get some SEO benefit as well.

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• Other Traffic Building Techniques

  I prefer to spend most of my time on methods that either produce a lasting increase in traffic, create more content, or create backlinks that pass Page Rank. There are, however, some fairly easy to do methods that can bring bursts of traffic, regardless of those elements. Sometimes, these methods can bring some lasting traffic as well. I don't use them often, though, since most of them don't bring higher search engine placement. Some of these types of techniques include Yahoo! Answers and Answerbag.com. You can sometimes generate some good traffic with these sites. Be careful not to spam them, of course.

  You may have noticed that I've left some methods off the list, such as press releases and link exchanges. While I will do some link exchanging, I think for the most part, it is not time well spent. Reciprocal linking doesn't have the punch it once had, and people often do not link to you correctly. As for press releases, that is not something that I have in my traffic building arsenal as of this writing. Press releases need to be done in very specific ways, and when I get around to testing them, I'll write about them. For now, I think the above list is plenty for you to get started on.

Paid Methods to Increase Website Traffic

Paid methods to increase traffic can be risky, expensive, and often do not produce the kind of return on investment (ROI) that will sustain a business. There are some exceptions to this, however, and if you expand your definition of paid traffic for just a moment, you might see some opportunities. If your business model is efficient, you can buy traffic via various methods and turn a profit. You can also work a little smarter by outsourcing some of the same free traffic building methods described above. I'll get into the details of the paid methods to increase website traffic in some future articles, but for now I've listed some of the paid methods below.

• Outsourced Content
• Paid Links
• Paid Article Marketing
• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Pay Per... Impression (PPI)