Increase Website Traffic -- 4 Solid Techniques

Increase Website Traffic -- 4 Solid Techniques
by Kurt Schmitt
Free Copy Of Web 2.0 The Latest Internet Wave
There are many methods that work to increase website traffic. Unfortunately, a number of the techniques being promoted are known as "black hat" and will either ultimately get you in trouble, or will only work for a very short period of time. Since you want your Web business to be around for a long time, it might be a better move to spend your time on something more lasting.

Instead of talking about sneaky methods and tricks, I'd like to cover a few of the "white hat" techniques that can bring lasting traffic. These aren't particularly flashy, but they produce results. The best thing about these techniques is that they'll keep producing traffic over many months and years.

Article marketing -- Using article marketing to increase website traffic offers several major benefits. The article marketing sites themselves often have high authority with Google and offer excellent backlinks, which can drive up your search engine rankings. In addition, because of the authority that these sites have, your posted articles will often rank high in the engines.

The article directories can send you direct traffic. This traffic is normally very targeted delivering visitors who already trust you and are often warm to becoming loyal visitors and customers. Once your article is published, other websites will republish your article with your backlink. Your job is done as soon as you publish, yet the viral effect created by republishing can live on for years. You can continue to get new backlinks without any further effort.

Social bookmarking -- Social bookmarking is an activity that can have great rewards for your site. It's easy to create a number of links back to your sites by social bookmarking a few pages. You can also encourage your visitors to do this for you by placing icons with links to popular social bookmarking sites. In addition, you can increase traffic to your own websites by bookmarking sites that link to yours.

Building content -- When in doubt, build more content. More pages on your site equate to more PageRank, more opportunities for adding in keywords that the search engines will pick up on, more pages to link to, and more information for your visitors. All of this adds up to increasing website traffic. I own a domain name because someone built an online store at the same time I was building a content site on the same subject, with almost the same name. The store is gone, my content site is still there, and I own that former online store's domain name.

Social media and community sites -- Many people think of Reddit and Digg, but forget about repurposing their content on other social media sites. Instead of trying to play the very difficult game of who's going to Digg me, you should look at user generated content sites that allow you to post a link to your site. Start with the biggest ones first, as they offer great backlinks and the potential for high traffic. These include Hubpages, Squidoo, and Buzzle, as well as a number of up and coming community sites published on the Ning platform and others like Tumblr.

These methods each work well on their own. Yes, if you understand simple SEO principles you can simply build content and eventually you'll have a successful site. You can write articles and drive traffic, and you can bookmark and republish your content on various social networks. If you combine these techniques, however, you'll see results much more quickly. While these are not the only methods to increase website traffic, they are safe, effective, and produce lasting results.

About the Author:

Kurt Schmitt publishes several Web properties serving thousand of visitors a month, and writes about the benefits of social bookmarking, article marketing and other Web promotion strategies. See his website for at least 3 more ways to increase website traffic .

Sphere: Related Content