Increasing Your Traffic through SEO
If you are a website owner, then you have already gone through what can be, depending on your website, a lengthy process of design and development. But you are going to need exposure. Why should you spend the time, money, and effort to build something great, if people won’t even know it exists? What you need now is Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. Search engine optimization can help you score well with leading search engines like Google and Yahoo. I want take this time to share some tips that you can use on your website to finally increase your traffic. Keep in mind though I’m not going to reveal the Colonel’s secret recipe in its entirety. For that you should consult with an SEO expert who can tailor a campaign for your website.
Importance of incoming links
You will need a lot of incoming links to stand a chance of being highly ranked on the major search engines. List your website with free and paid directories. You should not expect alot of traffic from these directories, but what you should expect is relevancy for the major engines. The engines take you more seriously when you have quality links pointing into your website. Some good places to start with directory submissions are improvinglinks.com and strongestlinks.com. Both of these websites list great directories and provide information on them.
Use link exchanges
A great way to get incoming links is to exchange links with quality websites having a similar theme to your website. Major engines such as Google will reward your website with higher rankings. Linkmarket and Value Exchange (free) are good places to start with link exchanges.
Help with and be helped by forum chat
Not only can you get good tips and advice from forums, you can post answers to people’s questions, helping others while you help yourself. Forums are another place where you can increase traffic to your website, all you have to do is remember to leave your link at the end of each post. Most likely, you are not allowed to blatantly advertise in forums, but you can leave a catchy signature, which should contain a link back to your website, and that will lead to a click.
Blogs away
You can also use blogs to increase your traffic. It’s another way to tell your clients and customers about what’s going on in your industry. You will achieve even more exposure, and gain relevance while at the same time helping people out with useful information about your business. If you want to use a blog successfully, try having a form that your readers can fill out for questions or feedback. Once again… you will receive repeat traffic. You can find out what real every people are looking and apply that data in your sales and marketing campaigns.
Article submission
Submitting your articles to directories is another great way to gain exposure for your website. People read your quality articles and check your site out. Remember to leave your by-line information (i.e. about author) at the end of your article, that way if someone reprints your article in full, your name and website URL are there. When your article appears on someone else’s site, you can gain traffic if they click your link after reading the article. Another added bonus is that you have an incoming link from the web site that is using your article.
Build company/client relationships with newsletters
Having your own newsletter will gain repeat traffic. People who sign up already like you and they are willing to hear what you have to say. It would be sheer folly overlook the value of having a quality newsletter.
Continue adding quality content
Want to keep gaining higher placement on the search engines? Just keep adding more new content with great keywords. The more relevant the content, the better you will fare with the search engines.
If you are not currently doing so, using any or all of these methods should raise your site traffic significantly.