Simple ways to grow your website's traffic
Posted on Oct 22, 2008 by
Paul WhiteA website's value is based on its traffic. When starting a new website you might think of trying every get rich quick scheme to grow your traffic. I strongly advise you to not waste your time. My clients often ask me how to increase their traffic and when I tell them how they are dissappointed. Good things don't happend over night. It takes time.
Bad ways to growing your traffic.
Link Farms
Link farms are
websites you join and they put your link on hundreds of other
websites, in return you add a little code to your website, and links are automatically inserted into your website. This may sound great, as the Search Engines crawl these links they will find your link and thus increase your ranking. The more external links you have the higher you will rank. But there is a downside. Many of the search engines have figured out which
websites are trying to use linkfarms. If they think your site is using link farms they could blacklist you from their index. Meaning you will never be found on google again.
Spamming
If you do any kind of unsolicited email
marketing, and include a link to your website, this could also penalize you on google. The free mail servers ( Yahoo, hotmail, gmail ) have very sophisticated algorithms to determine what emails are spam. If they think you are sending spam, they could blacklist your mailserver, or even your domain. If you really push it they could even blacklist you from their index.
Paid Traffic
Even though paid traffic usually won't hurt you on
SEO, it doesn't really matter. The measure of your website's value should be based on how much Search Driven Traffic you get. Even though traffic form sites that have linked to you is good. What matters is that people find you on Search Engines. When you stop paying for traffic, you will be right were you started from. Paid Traffic is often not real visitors. Sometimes they are just computer bots programmed to visit your site over a range of various IPs. This makes you look as if you are getting lots of unique visitors but you are not. Even the sites that do send you real visitors are not always sending you the visitors you want, and are often using Redirects to force people to your website.
Good ways of growing your traffic
Blogging
Most blogs give you the ability to post your comments along with a nickname, and website URL to your site of choice. I am not saying you should create your own blog ( even though I do recommend it ), but to instead post comments on other people's blogs. Search on google for blogs that have information relavent to your website, either by keywords or the content itself. Then post your comments. Don't spam your comments. Actually make a intelligent comment post that is relavent to their blog. The trick is instead of using your real name or your company name for your nickname, use a keyword or phrase. Like if you are a Commercial roofing installer in houston. Make your Nickname ( Houston Commercial Roofing ). Then for the URL put your full website URL. This is why it works. First by having a link from their blog to your site in your comment post, other people who read the blog can click on your nickname and checkout your site. Another reason, and the more important one is that over time the search engines will see this link from their blog to your site, and as a result your ranking will go up for the various keywords found on the blog, and especially for the keywords you used for your nickname. Over several months of posting comments on people's blogs you will start to notice the number of Search Driven Referals from google and yahoo will start to climb. This is not something that will yeild results overnight, but over time ( several weeks or months ) it does work.
Links Exchanges
If you can try to exchange links with other
websites that you have something in common with. Back to our original example with Houston Commericial Roofing. Try to link with other roofing sites or associations. If you can do a link exchange with your suppliers. Also exchange links with other sites based in Houston. Search engines will find the new links and as a result you will rank higher for the relative keywords and terms. Once again this won't happend overnight. It may take several weeks or months before you start to see results. Also keep in mind that it only benefits you if you are linking with sites that have a good page rank. Any site with low page rank. NA, 0, or even 1, won't be of any help to you
Fresh Content
Even though age can be a factor in determining how your site ranks. It is also important to have fresh content added to your site. Search Engines like new content
Pay Per Click Google Adwords
If you have figured out that its almost impossible to get to the top for search, you might have to do a little pay per click. Even though I believe that if you want to grow your website the right way it can be done through traditional networking and backlinks. Pay Per Click will drive quality customers to your site. The question is how much are you willing to pay for each quality customer, and how much of your profit margin are you willing to sacrafice?
Direct advertising
Larger website usually offer some kind of direct advertising for advertisers. If this website gets customers in your niche, it may be beneficial to do this. Just be sure to get some concrete metrics of their traffic. How many impressions, and how many unique visitors?
WhiteSites Blog
Thanks for sharing this; your input is appreciated and has made me change my opinion slightly. About the 3rd paragraph though, could you expand on that a little? I'm a bit confused about what you mean (so maybe others are too).