How to get more Traffic to my Website

By on 08/19/2009


How you get more traffic to your website is a question we would all like answered.  Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet, unless you want to pay a fortune to advertise on a high traffic site like Amazon or Yahoo.  But even then, I have seen bad advertisements or bad messages that I would not even click on.  Regardless, that’s not the way I want to go with this post.  I would like to focus on slowing building a search engine optimization, search engine marketing and social networking plan.

The first, and most important item to get more traffic to your site is content.  Without great content, no one is going to be interested.  The content also should be text on the page, not images or flash.  Images and flash are not indexed by the search engines, so you might have riveting marketing lingo, but if its an image or in flash, none of the words are going to be indexed as search-able.  Content and how the text lays out on the page are the building blocks of a great SEO plan.  You should also pay attention to header tags, or h1 & h2 tags.  The most important phrase on the page should be wrapped in a h1 tag.  It needs the be great keywords as well, such as “Atlanta Graphic Design Firm“, not “Welcome to our site“.  Any subheading should be wrapped in the h2 tag, so that the search engines know those are important as well.

Some other items to look at in your SEO plan, are your meta tags.  You have to have a great title and description.  Again, a title like “Atlanta Web Design Company | Black Bear Design” , not “Welcome to Black Bear Design“.  This is going to help rank you higher for search phrases, as well as entice users to click on your listing.

Now that you have your base SEO data in order, its time to start gaining some incoming links, or votes for your site.  Each incoming link to your site, that a search engine finds, is a vote of importance for your site.  You want to shoot for important sites, but sometimes that is difficult for a new website owner. Some easy ones are the social type sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg.  These sites will let you sign up for an account, and add information as well as links back to your site.  And best of all, they are all free!  These sites should be included in your SEM or Search Engine Marketing plan.

Also included in your SEM plan, should be what type of sites you are going to target, and what anchor text you are going to use. Anchor text is what the link will say, that links back to your site.  You don’t want to add a link such as www.blackbeardesign.com, you want to add a great search-able term, such as Affordable Web Design. This way, the search engines and users will know what they will find when they click this link.  Also, your anchor text needs to match what is on your page.

The next thing you should look at is your Social Networking plan.  Where are your customers at, and how do you find them on the network?  For example, I will use Twitter and the technique I use.  First you need a desktop program to work with, such as Seesmic Desktop.  Set up your Twitter account, and make sure you have a great name or URL.  I just set up an account for a client, in which we wanted to target the search term “Atlanta Tree Service“.  So the URL or account name I set up was Twitter.com/AtlantaTree.  Next, set your account up in your desktop software.  After you learn how to use Seesmic Desktop, you will notice multiple columns.  Use the search feature in the top right, and search for terms that you think users will be using that match your services.  For example, I searched for “Tree Service“.   Now every time someone mentions “Tree Service” on Twitter, it will show up in that search column.  You immediately add them as a friend, they will get an email notification with your name and picture you set up in your Twitter account, and notice you are a tree service.  How convenient, they were just looking for a tree service, and here you are in their inbox.

This is just one example of how to use social networks to drive traffic to your website.  Each social network has its own ‘thing’, so research them and figure out which is going to be the most beneficial for the time you spend.  Everything mentioned here takes time, but it is the correct way to build an online marketing plan that you can do yourself.  Using companies that promise fast returns using proprietary methods might actually hurt your standings with the search engines.  The companies that build and manage the search engines are smart, if you try and trick them, they will not be happy about it!

I hope some of these tips have given you ideas.  These are just the building blocks of an online website marketing campaign to drive traffic to your site.  Once the traffic gets there,  then you have to learn how to turn them into a customer.  If you have used any of these, or any other techniques, please leave a comment and share.

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9 responses to “How to get more Traffic to my Website”

  1. Yes, social networking helps you to get more traffic to your site…

  2. Leadhead says:

    A strategy I have been using is to get my current customers to become affiliates. Then I offer them 100% commissions. This works for me because I have a membership site but the structure could work well if you are trying to build a big list. I make a article on my results. You can read it here.
    http://extratrafficdashboard.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/how-i-personally-doubled-my-subscribers-in-30-days/

  3. Leadhead says:

    A strategy I have been using is to get my current customers to become affiliates. Then I offer them 100% commissions. This works for me because I have a membership site but the structure could work well if you are trying to build a big list. I make a article on my results. You can read it here.
    http://extratrafficdashboard.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/how-i-personally-doubled-my-subscribers-in-30-days/

  4. Donot says:

    Ever wondered how Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Wikipedia etc. got this much traffic without advertising..? Read this and you will get to know it. Do the same and you can see your traffic increasing tremendously
    http://melroz.blogspot.com/2011/06/attract-more-traffc-to-your-website.html

  5. Donot says:

    Ever wondered how Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Wikipedia etc. got this much traffic without advertising..? Read this and you will get to know it. Do the same and you can see your traffic increasing tremendously
    http://melroz.blogspot.com/2011/06/attract-more-traffc-to-your-website.html

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